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On a four-shelf shelf made of black sheet metal are the remains of figurative plaster casts and broken glass: a plaster child's head, a woman's face and a hand clutching a piece of cloth, as well as seven broken pieces of glass of various sizes. They all seem to be covered with soot. They are products of human culture, marked by the traces of the elemental power of fire, both life-sustaining and life-destroying.

Jannis Kounellis is one of the most important artists of Arte Povera in Italy; an art practice that uses very inconspicuous, everyday materials. Kounellis left behind the fixed categories of art such as painting, sculpture, object or environment. He declared space to be a real pictorial surface and incorporated it into his works. He attached great importance to the careful selection of materials. He used raw materials such as iron, wood and coal and combined them with materials and everyday objects that were predominantly industrially produced. Overall, these are materials that, in addition to their sensual qualities of warmth, cold, hardness and softness, also evoke ideas and images from our horizon of experience.
The untitled object presented here embodies such an inner experience and opens up thoughts about the inevitable decline of every culture, the destruction of man-made works in the course of history and the superiority of the natural elements.

Jannis Kounellis was born in 1936 in Piraeus, near Athens, Greece. He moved to Rome in 1956, where he lived and worked until his death in 2017.