Installation view with Idee di pietra—Ciliegio (2008)
Artwork © Giuseppe Penone. Photo: Marcus Veith
Installation view
Artwork © Giuseppe Penone. Photo: Marcus Veith
Installation view with Idee di pietra—Ciliegio (2008, detail)
Artwork © Giuseppe Penone. Photo: Marcus Veith
Installation view
Artwork © Giuseppe Penone. Photo: Marcus Veith
Installation view with Idee di pietra—Ciliegio (2008)
Artwork © Giuseppe Penone. Photo: Marcus Veithh
Installation view
Artwork © Giuseppe Penone. Photo: Marcus Veith
Installation view
Artwork © Giuseppe Penone. Photo: Marcus Veith
Installation view
Artwork © Giuseppe Penone. Photo: Marcus Veith
Installation view
Artwork © Giuseppe Penone. Photo: Marcus Veith
Installation view with Idee di pietra—Olmo (2008)
Artwork © Giuseppe Penone. Photo: Marcus Veith
Installation view with Idee di pietra—Olmo (2008, detail)
Artwork © Giuseppe Penone. Photo: Marcus Veith
Installation view with Idee di pietra—Olmo (2008)
Artwork © Giuseppe Penone. Photo: Marcus Veith
A tree summarizes in an exemplary way the contrast between two forces: the force of gravity and the weight of life we are part of. The need and the search for balance, which exists in every living being to counteract the force of gravity, is evident in every step and in every small action of our lives. It is a river stone that appears amid the branches of a tree.
—Giuseppe Penone
Gagosian is pleased to present Idee di Pietra, a special installation by Giuseppe Penone in the dramatic alpine landscape of Gstaad. Two large-scale bronze tree sculptures from the Idee di pietra (Ideas of stone) series have been installed on a hillside pasture above the main village, next to the Hotel Le Grand Chalet.
Idee di pietra – Olmo (2008) and Idee di pietra – Ciliegio (2011) were both exhibited in Penone’s dedicated exhibition at Château de Versailles in 2013. As the titles suggest, these unique sculptures are modeled after an elm tree (olmo) and a cherry tree (ciliegio). Addressing concepts of gravity, balance, and scale, while merging the manmade and the organic, Penone often manipulates the innate elegance of trees by twisting, deconstructing, hollowing, and uprooting the organic figures. He also incorporates traces of fingerprints, nails, wires, carvings, or precariously placed boulders underscoring the artificiality of art and the effect of human interaction with the natural world.
Idee di Pietra engages the phenomenology of stone, its physical and aesthetic qualities in relation to the trees and the mountainous setting. The base of the crown of each tree cradles a large single boulder from Piedmont, Italy, held secure despite the spindly branches that bear them up. Penone selected additional rocks from a quarry in the nearby village of Lauenen, placing them about the lush meadow in which the sculptures stand, acknowledging the processes out of which the Alps themselves formed in geological history.
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 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.
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.
