Gesture
1961
Sculpture, 34 x 30 x 100 cm.
Materials: iron, coloured thread, wood
Collection: National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens - Donated by the Artist (Inv. no. 124/01).
[…] In the works grouped under the umbrella title Gestures (1960-1962) created when the artist was living in Sixties Paris, then dominated by the New Realists and their theoretician, Pierre Restany, Kessanlis appropriated scraps of urban and industrial reality. His Gestures had much in common with the work of the New Realists, who had reworked a core artistic paradigm of the historic avant-garde of the early 20th century –the ready-made– inscribing it into public space, the society of consumption and spectacle. Kessanlis extracts obsolete industrial objects and rubbish like cloths, plaster sacks, crumpled paper and parts of metal machines from the urban fabric and the «And the post-industrial city [which] has become a huge objet trouvé which limits cannot track down» and inserts them in his work. […]
Tina Pandi, EMST
Nikos Kessanlis. From matiere to the image, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, 2007
