Jannis Kounellis Solo Show

“I come with empty hands as an old painter”. It is with these words that Jannis Kounellis had answered, few months ago, to the invitation of Monnaie de Paris which wanted to start 2016 with one of the “sacred monsters” of contemporary art.

Jannis Kounellis begins with the heart of the last craftsman factory in Paris – one of the last foundries still in activity, an institution that puts together every day the working world and the one of creation – and the importance of energy in order to compose a real dramatic sculpture using the whole thousand square meters of the 18th century salons by the Seine. Eminently present, concrete, irreducible, Kounellis’ new exhibition strikes the visitors with a direct experience, without any intermediary.

Thus the artist involves the visitor and raises the question of the process of an artwork’s fabrication. It is in the doing, in the intuition of forms, in the modeling, that the project of the artist emerges: the materials that Kounellis uses in his displays are political and historical messengers as much as they are also about memory and present times.