22.04.06 | 04.11.06

Untitled 1969 Untitled 1971 Untitled 2006 Untitled 2000 Untitled 1993 Untitled 2003 Untitled 2004 Untitled 2004 Untitled 1966 Untitled 1966 Untitled 1967 Untitled 1960 Untitled 1960 Untitled 1967 Untitled 1967 / 1968 Untitled 2006 Untitled 1967 Untitled 1969 Untitled 1969 Untitled 1969 Untitled 1969 Untitled 1969 Untitled 1969 Untitled 1988 Untitled 2005 Untitled 1988 Untitled 1969 Untitled 1971 Untitled 1958 Untitled 1959 Untitled 1968 Untitled 1969 Untitled 1985 Untitled 1988 Untitled 2005 Untitled 1977 Civil Tragedy 1975 Untitled 1975 Untitled 1984 Untitled 1967 Untitled 1967 Untitled 1968 Untitled 2005 Untitled 1973 Untitled 1969 Untitled 1957 Untitled 1969

Jannis Kounellis

Untitled

2003

Courtesy :

Like the toy steam train, the old sewing machine is an object of use tied to the dawn of western industrial civilization and is revived by Kounellis as a symbol of the epos of a culture: “The sewing machine,” the artist explains, “is epic, it is evidence of tremendous beauties, but also tremendous sacrifices” (Jannis Kounellis, in G. Celant, 1992, p. 29). And so they are objects laden with personal memories and collective history.
The image appears in Kounellis’s work beginning in 1973, in the Manifesto for a utopian theater, consisting of a sewing machine with a white sheet of paper beneath the needle, next to a yellow painting and a drawing with photographs of emigrants (the work was exhibited in Chicago in 1986). It reappears in Untitled, 1987, made from a large iron panel with propane gas flames at the center, along the perimeter of which Kounellis places some old sewing machines, to form a sort of frame (reproduced in G. Moure, 1996, p. 221), and in the photograph with a foot that rests against an old model sewing machine, used as an invitation for his solo show at the Galerie Ameliobraquot Pièce Unique in Paris (Untitled, 1986). In the exhibition installed in 1991 in Halifax, in a former industrial building, now the headquarters for the Henry Moore Sculpture Trust Studio, Kounellis uses an iron rod to suspend two sewing machines from a column; two years later, at the Kunsthalle in Recklinghausen, he exhibits a multitude of sewing machines, covered with burlap sacks, on top of old tables, pushed together to form a large platform, or perhaps more accurately a stage, on which the very presence of these objects – at this point obsolete and outdated – tells of the work, the sacrifices, the history of hosts of women. This particular installation, used in subsequent years to present various objects and materials (pieces of rolls of lead at Castelluccio in Pienza in 1996; sacks in Buenos Aires and in Montevideo in 2000 and 2001; a circle of coal in Athens in 2004; or a significant selection of works by the artist in Oxford in 2004), is repeated by Kounellis in 2003 at the Galleria Christian Stein in Milan, where he exhibits the work shown here, characterized by the presence, beneath the sewing machine, of a stain of white oil of the type used for painting, as if to recreate the fabrics that used to pass beneath those needles, emphasizing, at the same time, the creative value of the work.

Pireo 1936
In Kounellis’s earliest works one can already glimpse this tension between a search for historic and poetic identity and a desire to break with the status quo by opening ...
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Galleria Christian Stein, Milano, 2003; Kunstraum Innsbruck, Innsbruck, 2003