Over the past forty years sculptor and installation artist Jannis Kounellis has established himself as a unique presence in the world of contemporary art, finding his special location in Rome. At the age of twenty he made the journey there from Piraeus, the ancient port of Athens, and began his career. His works continue to bear the hallmarks of his Eastern Mediterranean origin, as well as testify to his deep concern with the links between Russian Modernism and the Byzantine tradition.
His installations, whether temporary or semi-permanent, set off a trail of associations. Stephen Bann refers to Kounellis's working practice as a process of 'making strange'. A potent example is his 1969 installation of twelve live tethered horses in a gallery in Rome, recalling the equestrian monuments of Roman antiquity.
The author has not set out to write a conventional monograph about the artist, rather, he looks at the underlying mechanisms in Kounellis's practice, suggesting the ways in which they are important in the broader context of late modernist art. He outlines the distinctive way in which Kounellis takes account of space as a necessary preliminary to working within it, and discusses the historical and cultural dimension to which Kounellis lays claim.