I seek dispersed history in emotional and formal fragments. I am dramatically looking for unity, even if hard to grasp, albeit utopian, albeit impossible and, for that reason dramatic.
Poetic and profoundly symbolic, Mare from 1963 encapsulates Jannis Kounellis’s early engagement with painting as a vessel for memory, migration, and identity. Executed shortly after the artist’s move from Greece to Italy, the work reflects the emotional and geographical transition that would define his career. Having lived through the turmoil of war and displacement, Kounellis left Greece in 1956 to study at Rome’s Accademia delle Belle Arti, embracing a new cultural landscape while simultaneously confronting the loss of his homeland. “I am a Greek person but an Italian artist (...) I want to leave Greece behind me.” (Jannis Kounellis quoted in: Exh Cat, Milan, Refettorio delle Stelline, Kounellis, 1998, p. 17)
In Mare, the sea emerges as both subject and metaphor: a boundary and a bridge between two worlds. Against a pale, weathered ground divided horizontally into two panels, four undulating blue lines ripple across the lower section of the canvas. Their rhythmic simplicity evokes the calm persistence of waves while simultaneously suggesting movement. Reduced to its most essential elements, the sea becomes an emblem of transformation.
The quiet austerity of Mare reflects Kounellis’s decisive move away from narrative representation toward a language of abstraction imbued with thought and emotion. In early 1960s Rome, he encountered a community of artists, among them Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana, and Piero Manzoni as well as Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg, who challenged the limits of painting through material and conceptual experimentation. Influenced by these dialogues, Kounellis began to treat the canvas not as a surface for depiction, but as an arena for experimentation.
It is possible to speak of classicism in Kounellis's work: everything goes back to the primigenial unity, to the man who is also humanism.
At once minimal and lyrical, the painting anticipates Kounellis’s later role as a central figure of Arte Povera. Its restrained vocabulary—line, color, texture—reveals a sensibility rooted in the real and the metaphysical. The waves, neither entirely abstract nor representational, oscillate between sign and image, evoking the artist’s enduring fascination with the tension between language and form. In this distilled gesture, Kounellis transforms a familiar motif into a profound meditation on distance, belonging, and the act of creation itself.
While traveling through Europe in the summer of 1982 to visit museums, galleries, and art fairs, the present owners encountered this Kounellis painting and were immediately drawn to its atmospheric ground and gestural, wavelike strokes of color that lyrically evoke the vastness of the sea. Through this subtle synthesis of form and meaning, Mare encapsulates Kounellis’s early vision: to create an art that transcends geography and language, one that distills personal history into universal image. The work’s restrained power lies in its ability to evoke emotion through absence—to make visible the spaces between memory and matter, origin and destination. Within its luminous austerity, the sea endures as both symbol and substance: a site of passage, reflection, and infinite return.
