Jannis Kounellis, one of the co-founders of Arte Povera in Italy in the 1960s, is regarded as a key figure in contemporary art. The use of contradictory principles, forms and materials is an essential element of his work. For 30 years he has been combining apparently contradictory substances like the industrial product steel with natural products like cotton, eggs or coal. In the process he dispenses with every form of hierarchy: coffee powder, jute sacks, coal, oil lamps, steel plates, gas flames, shoes or material all play equally important roles in his installations, which express the basic principles of life - heat and distance, transience and endurance, creation and decay. In this monograph, selected works from every period of Jannis Kounellis' career give an insight into his most essential creative principles - from the early pictures with numbers and letters, his first works with coal and fire, to important installations, and right up to works of the 1990s which already demonstrate the processing of the vocabulary of forms he developed in the sixties and seventies.