Maria Nepomuceno

Jannis Kounellis (b.1936, Greece – 2017, Italy) Kounellis was one of the world’s leading contemporary artists with a career spanning more than forty years. Kounellis’s work developed as a spectacular mixture of painting, collages and the staging of installations, ‘environments’, performances and theatrical shows, designed to express the tensions and alienation of contemporary society, and the multiplicity, obscurity and fragmentation of its language. In addition to his large- scale works, Kounellis created art jewellery in collaboration with Elisabetta Cipriani, translating his Arte Povera ethos into wearable art. These wearable works echo his sculptural vision, transforming his artistic vocabulary into intimate, tactile pieces that challenge traditional distinctions between fine art and jewellery He was a prominent member of Arte Povera, and his work was characterised by the juxtaposition of objects, materials and actions that were both physically and culturally antithetical to one another. Although starting as a painter, in the 1960s Kounellis introduced the use of everyday materials to his work – such as wool, coal, iron, stones, earth, wood and objects trouvés – as well as animals to create sculptures and installations. Since 1969 Kounellis has exhibited internationally and his work is part of various major public collections such as […]

Sophie Whettnall (b. 1973, Brussels, Belgium) is a multidisciplinary artist using video, performance, drawing and painting. Her works oscillate between elegance, sensuality and energy. Since the nineties, the work of Sophie Whettnall offers a reflection on the forces that define our relationship to the world around us, by materialising and documenting them. Sophie Whettnall focuses on light and analyses its presence and zones of absence and passage. The aesthetic pieces of the artist prove simultaneously sensitive and powerful, resting on a dialectic tension and attempt to instigate a relation between contradicting concepts and perceptions: between softness and sensuousness, yin and yang, women and men… Her work also contributes to a form of autobiographical project. Sophie Whettnall’s work has been exhibited at the Think with the senses, Feel with the mind, Art in te present tense, (cur. Robert Storr), 52nd Venice Biennial (Italy), at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (Salt Lake City), MAC’S, Site du Grand Hornu (Hornu), DOT. Project (London), Leal Rios Foundation (Barcelona), Centrale for Contemporary Art (Brussels), Palais des Beaux-Arts (Brussels), Museu de Arte Moderna Aloisio Magalhães (Recife), CGAC (Santiago de Compostella), COAC (Barcelona), Vera Cortes Art Agency (Lisbon), Krinzinger Projekte (Vienna), L’orangerie, espace d’art contemporain (Bastogne), […]