Jannis Kounellis was born in Piraeus, the port of Athens, three years before the outbreak of the Second World War. He lived there throughout that conflict, and then through ten years of the Greek Civil War, before leaving his native country to seek a more settled existence in Rome. It was in Italy that he found his vocation as an artist, and he has lived and worked there ever since. Although he swore never to return to Greece – a promise that he has subsequently broken, but on only a handful of occasions – he has said that he would like his work to evoke, among other things, the sights and smells of the port where he grew up.

The broad range of materials which he has used is evident, in all its heterogeneity, in a new exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford. Kounellis has formed assemblages from great burlap sacks of coffee or coal; he has created paintings from patches of tar like spillages of oil from dockside machinery; he has made sculptures from rows of empty bottles, from pieces of driftwood, from the skeletons of long-since-wrecked fishing craft and from great canisters of propane gas. He is an aesthete of such ordinary objects and has been ever since he first came to prominence, in the late 1950s, as one of the leading proponents of what came to be known as “Arte Povera” – a phrase coined by the movement’s principal theoretician and apologist, the critic Germano Celant, meaning, literally, “poor art”, art fashioned from the worn, distressed materials of everyday life. Such things are often freighted, in Kounellis’s case, with associations of travel or trade, the exchange of objects and ideas, between different societies and civilisations.

Kounellis’s art is inherently...

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