Installation view, photo by Douglas M. Parker Studio
Installation view, photo by Douglas M. Parker Studio
Installation view, photo by Douglas M. Parker Studio
Installation view, photo by Douglas M. Parker Studio
Installation view, photo by Douglas M. Parker Studio
Giuseppe Penone
Luce zenitale / Zenithal Light, 2012
Bronze and gold, 157 ½ × 59 ⅛ × 59 ⅛ inches (400 × 150 × 150 cm)
© Giuseppe Penone, photo by Josh White
Giuseppe Penone
Luce zenitale / Zenithal Light, 2012 (detail)
Bronze and gold, 157 ½ × 59 ⅛ × 59 ⅛ inches (400 × 150 × 150 cm)
© Giuseppe Penone
Giuseppe Penone
Albero porta—cedro / Door Tree—Cedar, 2012
Cedar wood, 125 × 40 × 40 inches (317.5 × 101.6 × 101.6 cm)
© Giuseppe Penone, photo by Josh White
Giuseppe Penone
Albero porta—cedro / Door Tree—Cedar, 2012 (detail)
Cedar wood, 125 × 40 × 40 inches (317.5 × 101.6 × 101.6 cm)
© Giuseppe Penone, photo by Josh White
Giuseppe Penone
Anatomia / Anatomy, 2011 (view 1)
White Carrara Marble, 124 × 77 × 62 inches (315 × 195.6 × 157.5 cm)
© Giuseppe Penone, photo by Josh White
Giuseppe Penone
Anatomia / Anatomy, 2011 (view 2)
White Carrara Marble, 124 × 77 × 62 inches (315 × 195.6 × 157.5 cm)
© Giuseppe Penone, photo by Josh White
Giuseppe Penone
Anatomia / Anatomy, 2011 (detail)
White Carrara Marble, 124 × 77 × 62 inches (315 × 195.6 × 157.5 cm)
© Giuseppe Penone, photo by Josh White
Giuseppe Penone
Pelle di foglie—5 foglie a terra, 2011
Bronze, gold, 113 × 75 × 39 inches (287 × 190.5 × 99.1 cm)
© Giuseppe Penone, photo by Josh White
Giuseppe Penone
Spine d'acacia—Contatto, aprile 2006, 2006
Canvas, acrylic, glass microspheres, acacia thorns, 118 ½ × 189 ½ × 2 inches (301 × 481.3 × 5.1 cm)
© Giuseppe Penone, photo by Josh White
What fascinates me about trees is their structure: the tree is a being that memorializes the feats of its existence in its very form. Similarly, our bodies could be considered the sum of the performance of our existence. The tree can be considered a metaphor for the work of a sculptor who fixes his actions in the material.
—Giuseppe Penone
Gagosian Beverly Hills is pleased to present Giuseppe Penone’s first major exhibition on the West Coast.
In sculptures, drawings, photographs, and installations, Penone heightens the subtle levels of interplay between man, art, and nature. His work represents a poetic expansion of Arte Povera’s radical break with conventional media in favor of organic and accessible matter, and emphasizes the involuntary processes of respiration, growth, and aging that are shared by man and tree. During the late 1960s in the forests near Garessio, Italy, Penone stunted the growth of trees with nails, metal wire, and an iron cast of his hand that gripped a living trunk, thus insinuating himself into the cycles of the landscape. He continued to engage his own body in the early 1970s by drawing the textures of his skin and casting his face in plaster; in To Reverse One’s Eyes (1970), he was photographed wearing mirrored contact lenses, positing vision as the precise point of separation between self and environment. In recent years, Penone has taken the natural attributes of traditional sculptural media, including wood, bronze, and marble, as points of departure for the creation of monumental, tactile forms.
The exhibition takes its title from a passage in John Keats’s poem Ode to Psyche (1819), an anecdotal narrative of love, nature, and the creative imagination. Each work is a revelation of the sculptural qualities innate to natural materials. Penone chisels cedar trunks and masses of marble to expose the deep patterns resulting from growth and time, characteristics that he further emphasizes through carving, patination, and replication. In Anatomia / Anatomy (2011), a 23-ton marble block, he reconceives the veined surface as a matrix of tendrils, advancing the original marks into multiple dimensions.
Adam D. Weinberg has been working with Giuseppe Penone on an exhibition of the artist’s new sculptures, The Reflection of Bronze, that opens at Gagosian, New York, on April 22. The works explore the character and possibilities of bronze. Here, Weinberg considers Penone’s enduring engagement with the alloy and addresses the conceptual underpinnings of the exhibition’s three-room structure.
Bartolomeo Sala considers the brief yet revolutionary dreams of Arte Povera. On the occasion of a retrospective at the Bourse de Commerce, Paris, he explores the historical conditions that gave rise to the radical midcentury movement and the warnings we might glean today from its legacy.
The Fall 2022 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Jordan Wolfson’s House with Face (2017) on its cover.
Le Couvent Sainte-Marie de La Tourette, in Éveux, France, is both an active Dominican priory and the last building designed by Le Corbusier. As a result, the priory, completed in 1961, is a center both religious and architectural, a site of spiritual significance and a magnetic draw for artists, writers, architects, and others. This fall, at the invitation of Frère Marc Chauveau, Giuseppe Penone will be exhibiting a selection of existing sculptures at La Tourette alongside new work directly inspired by the context and materials of the building. Here, Penone and Frère Chauveau discuss the power and peculiarities of the space, as well as the artwork that will be exhibited there.
As spring approaches in the Northern Hemisphere, Sydney Stutterheim reflects on the iconography and symbolism of the season in art both past and present.
Elizabeth Mangini writes on Giuseppe Penone’s installation of two sculptures at San Francisco’s Fort Mason.
The Spring 2020 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #412 (2003) on its cover.
An outdoor installation by Giuseppe Penone in San Francisco’s historic Fort Mason features two life-size bronze sculptures cast from fallen trees. The project continues the artist’s long investigation of the perpetual give-and-take between humans and nature. In this video, Penone discusses what drew him to this landscape and the concepts behind the installation.
Gagosian director Pepi Marchetti Franchi speaks about Giuseppe Penone’s recent exhibition in San Francisco, detailing the various works and their relationships to the artist’s long-standing sculptural practice.
One year after the opening of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, Jean Nouvel and Giuseppe Penone sat down with Alain Fleischer, Pepi Marchetti Franchi, and Hala Wardé to reflect on how the museum and Penone’s commissioned artworks for the space came to be.
Jenny Saville reveals the process behind her new self-portrait, painted in response to Rembrandt’s masterpiece Self-Portrait with Two Circles.
Giuseppe Penone discusses his new monograph, The Inner Life of Forms, with the book’s editor Carlos Basualdo, senior curator of contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, at the Greene Space, New York. Hosted by art critic Deborah Solomon.
The Winter 2018 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available. Our cover this issue comes from High Times, a new body of work by Richard Prince.
In the small skiing village of Gstaad, among the towering mountains of the Swiss Alps, lies a surprising and ambitious exhibition of sculpture by Giuseppe Penone. Susan Ellicott tells the story of how this installation came to be.
The Spring 2018 Gagosian Quarterly with a cover by Ed Ruscha is now available for order.
Giuseppe Penone speaks with Carlos Basualdo and Pepi Marchetti Franchi about his monograph.
In Giuseppe Penone: ephemeris we get a glimpse of his process as he explores some of the ideas behind Equivalenze.
