Metal, glass and hair
Tate Modern
Tate Collection
Works with images
Works on display
General Collection
ARTIST ROOMS
National Heritage Memorial Fund
Art Fund
Collection
<a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/jannis-kounellis-1438" aria-label="More by Jannis Kounellis" data-gtm-name="header_link_artist" data-gtm-destination="page--artist">Jannis Kounellis</a>
Hair
ARTIST ROOMS
Acquired jointly with the National Galleries of Scotland through The d'Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund 2008
abstraction
body
emotions, concepts and ideas
formal qualities
geometric
hair
monochromatic
non-representational
people
repetition
<p><span>Untitled (Hair)</span> 2004 is a wall-mounted work that consists of a portrait-orientated steel box in which four hanks of long, black human hair are arranged. The shallow, glass-fronted box is displayed upright on the wall and contains a flat steel panel into which have been punched eight holes in two columns – one set of four towards the left side of the panel and the other set of four towards the right. The hanks of hair have been threaded through these holes so that they hang horizontally across the steel panel, appearing roughly parallel to one another in four curved lines.</p>
sculpture metal glass hair
24 July 2023 – 30 June 2024
2024-06-30
24 July 2023 – 30 June 2024
2024-06-30
2023-07-24
Tate Modern (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/
2023-07-24
ARTIST ROOMS Jannis Kounellis
Collection based display
Untitled (Hair)
object: 652 × 450 × 140 mm
<a href="/search?gid=999999788" data-gtm-name="tombstone_link_bequest" data-gtm-destination="list-page--search-results">ARTIST ROOMS</a>
Acquired jointly with the National Galleries of Scotland through The d'Offay Donation with assistance from the <a href="/search?gid=999999967" data-gtm-name="tombstone_link_bequest" data-gtm-destination="list-page--search-results">National Heritage Memorial Fund</a> and the <a href="/search?gid=999999968" data-gtm-name="tombstone_link_bequest" data-gtm-destination="list-page--search-results">Art Fund</a> 2008
<div class="text">
<p>
<i>Untitled (Hair)</i> 2004 is a wall-mounted work that consists of a portrait-orientated steel box in which four hanks of long, black human hair are arranged. The shallow, glass-fronted box is displayed upright on the wall and contains a flat steel panel into which have been punched eight holes in two columns – one set of four towards the left side of the panel and the other set of four towards the right. The hanks of hair have been threaded through these holes so that they hang horizontally across the steel panel, appearing roughly parallel to one another in four curved lines.</p>
<p>From 1989 to 2005 Jannis Kounellis made a series of works produced in editions, described as multiples, in which he incorporated elements drawn from the vocabulary of his earlier practice. <i>Untitled (Hair)</i> is one of these multiples, and is number seventeen in an edition of twenty-five.</p>
<p>The human hair motif in <i>Untitled (Hair)</i> was among those that Kounellis took from his earlier works, such as <i>Untitled</i> 1969 (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris), in which a central braid of blonde hair falls from two holes in a steel panel. While long hair could have connotations of beauty and grooming, when separated from the body it also has an uncanny and perhaps abject quality, recalling the way it was used by the surrealists in works such as Mimi Parent’s <i>Masculin-Féminin</i> 1959 (see Mimi Parent and other artists, <i>Boîte alerte </i>1959, Tate <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/parent-boite-alerte-t07621" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>T07621</span></a>).</p>
<p>Art historian Jean-Christophe Ammann has written that the disembodiment of the braid in Kounellis’s work ‘implies that it has been cut off, implies pain, punishment, separation; refers to drama, a rite of passage; of consequences based on a burdensome, always present, but intangible, framework of conventions and traditions’ (quoted in Scheps 2010, p.42.) These sinister undertones recall the fate of the inmates of jails or concentration camps whose hair is forcibly removed, as well as the biblical story in which Delilah rids Samson of his strength by cutting off his hair. Such uneasy undercurrents are present in <i>Untitled (Hair)</i>, in which the encased hanks, far from being locks retained as keepsakes, seem like fetishised trophies of the one from whom they were taken.</p>
<p>
<b>Further reading</b>
<br/>Stephen Bann, <i>Jannis Kounellis</i>,<i> </i>London 2003.<br/>Marc Scheps, <i>Jannis Kounellis: XXII Stations on an Odyssey 1969–2010</i>, Munich 2010.</p>
<p>Ruth Burgon<br/>The University of Edinburgh<br/>January 2015</p>
<p>
<i>The University of Edinburgh is a research partner of ARTIST ROOMS</i>.</p>
</div>

Summary
2017-05-19T00:00:00
summary
SHORT_TEXT
abstraction body emotions, concepts and ideas formal qualities geometric hair monochromatic non-representational people repetition