The curator’s craft · 03
Germano Celant and Jannis Kounellis: the retrospective as montage
At Ca’ Corner della Regina, more than sixty works reconstructed Kounellis’s practice through material, architecture and exhibition memory.
Reconstructing without neutralising
In 2019 Germano Celant curated the first extensive Jannis Kounellis retrospective after the artist’s death. Developed with Archivio Kounellis, it brought together more than sixty works from 1959 to 2015.
Letters, arrows, sacks, coal, metal, coats and musical instruments entered into dialogue with the eighteenth-century rooms rather than being isolated in an abstract chronology.
Architecture tells the story
Kounellis worked with weight, thresholds, gravity and theatre. Celant made walls, doors, floors and courtyard part of the montage; the installations occupied and measured space.
Films, catalogues, invitations, posters and archival photographs restored the conditions in which the works had appeared. An artwork’s biography includes its installations and transformations.
Documenting variable work
For installations made from ordinary materials, originality is only one question. Diagrams, quantities, dimensions, replaceable parts, artist instructions and approved precedents matter.
A rigorous exhibition offers comparisons, while a purchase requires the certificate for that specific work. Historical photographs and catalogues help preserve relationships, tension and proportion.
Sources and further reading
Sources allow readers to verify and explore. Official artist links are part of the feature, not an appendix.
ADVAcquistare Arte recommends: Resin-sealed books, words and layered images turn melancholy into a material narrative.
Painting · memory · collage
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