From May 13 to June 16, 2026, the Gallery of 10 Corso Como in Milan presents an exhibition project dedicated to Jannis Kounellis (Piraeus, 1936 - Rome, 2017), among the main protagonists ofArte Povera and a central figure intwentieth-century art. The exhibition, titled Jannis Kounellis. Untitled and curated by Alessio de’ Navasques, was created in collaboration with Galleria Fumagalli and features a large installation made by the Greek artist in 2009.
The intervention fits into the rethought spaces of 10 Corso Como, once industrial environments transformed into an exhibition space, and establishes a direct dialogue with Kounellis’ research, which throughout his career has often chosen unconventional contexts for his works. Churches, garages, ruins and former industrial spaces have in fact represented for the artist privileged places in which to move his exhibition practice outside the traditional system of museums and galleries, toward a more public and shared dimension.
At the center of the exhibition is a large installation composed of seventy black coats, arranged in the space as silent presences and at the same time as traces of the past. The work constructs a kind of essential dramaturgy, in which the white gallery is transformed into a bare, rigorous theater and the visitor takes on the role of protagonist. The tight sequence of coats generates a striking visual device that invites the viewer to slow down and engage with a reflection on time, memory and the human condition.
Coats are presented as objects capable of preserving a double trace, material and immaterial, of the person who wore them. They become signs of absence and presence, testimonies of lived lives, elements that refer to individual and collective stories. Symbols of protection but also of vulnerability, they evoke movement, passage and the precariousness of existence. In this perspective, the coat is transformed into a direct reference to man and becomes the focus of the artist’s research, included in a kind of grand one-act in which life itself is staged.
The work takes on a particular topicality in a present marked by profound political and social upheavals, in which the international debate returns to focus on migration, displacement and the condition of the human being in transit. The installation thus imposes itself as a suspension, an invitation to stop and go beyond the surface, reading in the absence of bodies a reflection on collective destiny and the fragility of contemporary experience. Clothing is proposed as a testimony of time and as an element loaded with cultural and social references. It refers to the literary tradition of Gogol and Dostoevsky, but also to neorealist cinema, becoming an allegory of nomadism and diaspora and the bearer of a precise historical memory. In Kounellis’ installation, the coat becomes stain, cast, body and shroud, holding together sacred and social dimensions.
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| Jannis Kounellis on display at 10 Corso Como in Milan with installation of seventy coats |
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