Curated by Germano Celant

As one of the artists central to Arte Povera, Jannis Kounellis (1936–2017) transcended that influential but limiting rubric with a body of work as striking in lyrical allusions as it is rich in material immediacy. Curated by Germano Celant, who named and championed the movement, this retrospective, the first since the artist’s death, will feature seventy works created between 1958 and 2016, thus providing a comprehensive assessment of his aesthetic evolution—from the proto-Pop paintings he made in postwar Rome to his installations of quotidian things inducing sensory stimulation, such as coal or coffee grounds, wool or rocks. Kounellis’s set designs for theater and opera will also be on view, underscoring the enduring frontality and symmetry of his later work. If Kounellis contributed to the dematerializing tendencies that transformed 1960s aesthetics, he also produced a body of objects shot through with an arresting poetics of contingency.

— Ara H. Merjian