Lara Nickel, 12 Horses: Homage to Jannis Kounellis

In a masterful meditation on the dialectics of homage and reinvention, Lara Nickel's 12 Horses project interrogates one of Arte Povera's most paradigmatic moments—Jannis Kounellis's 1969 installation of twelve living horses at Galleria L'Attico. The exhibition, documented in this lavishly illustrated volume, demonstrates how Nickel's intervention transforms Kounellis's radical gesture of institutional critique into a complex investigation of pictorial representation, spatial politics, and embodied spectatorship. Through twelve life-sized equine portraits executed with hyperrealistic precision and installed with decidedly post-medium consciousness (positioned perpendicular to the walls of Turin's Fondazione 107) Nickel orchestrates a sophisticated dialogue between painting's historical trajectory and its contemporary possibilities. The catalogue, anchored by Germano Celant's incisive analysis of Kounellis's original gesture and culminating in Nickel's own meditation on painting's gravitational descent from the gallery wall, positions this work within a broader theoretical framework that encompasses both the legacy of Arte Povera and pressing questions about the status of representation, materiality, and institutional space in contemporary art.

Published by Skira editore S.p.A, Milan, 2022

Essays by Germano Celant, José Jiménez, Alex Bacon, and Lara Nickel

Designed by Tim Laun and Natalie Wedeking

Hardcover, fully illustrated, 216 pages

_{© Lara Nickel; © Jannis Kounellis by SIAE}