Giuseppe Penone: Impronte di luce / Empreintes de lumière, rue de Ponthieu, Paris, October 17–December 22, 2023

Installation Views

Installation video. — Installation video

Installation view. Artwork © Giuseppe Penone/2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Thomas Lannes — Installation view
Artwork © Giuseppe Penone/2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Thomas Lannes

Thumbnail - Installation view. Artwork © Giuseppe Penone/2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Thomas Lannes

Works Exhibited

Giuseppe Penone, Impronte di luce (Imprints of Light), 2023. Oil on canvas, 72 ⅛ × 72 ⅛ inches (183 × 183 cm) © Giuseppe Penone/2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Thomas Lannes — Giuseppe Penone
*Impronte di luce* (*Imprints of Light*), 2023
Oil on canvas, 72 ⅛ × 72 ⅛ inches (183 × 183 cm)
© Giuseppe Penone/2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Thomas Lannes

Giuseppe Penone, Impronte di luce (Imprints of Light), 2022. Printing ink and pencil on paper, 13 × 9 ½ inches (33 × 24 cm) © Giuseppe Penone/2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Thomas Lannes — Giuseppe Penone
*Impronte di luce* (*Imprints of Light*), 2022
Printing ink and pencil on paper, 13 × 9 ½ inches (33 × 24 cm)
© Giuseppe Penone/2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Thomas Lannes

Giuseppe Penone, Soffio, 1981. Terra-cotta, 28 ¾ × 15 ¾ × 15 ¾ inches (73 × 40 × 40 cm) © Giuseppe Penone/2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Thomas Lannes — Giuseppe Penone
*Soffio*, 1981
Terra-cotta, 28 ¾ × 15 ¾ × 15 ¾ inches (73 × 40 × 40 cm)
© Giuseppe Penone/2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Thomas Lannes

Giuseppe Penone, Senza titolo, 1983. China ink on paper on canvas, 78 ¾ × 43 ⅜ inches (200 × 110 cm) © Giuseppe Penone/2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Thomas Lannes — Giuseppe Penone
*Senza titolo*, 1983
China ink on paper on canvas, 78 ¾ × 43 ⅜ inches (200 × 110 cm)
© Giuseppe Penone/2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Thomas Lannes

Thumbnail - Giuseppe Penone, Impronte di luce (Imprints of Light), 2023. Oil on canvas, 72 ⅛ × 72 ⅛ inches (183 × 183 cm) © Giuseppe Penone/2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Thomas Lannes

Thumbnail - Giuseppe Penone, Impronte di luce (Imprints of Light), 2022. Printing ink and pencil on paper, 13 × 9 ½ inches (33 × 24 cm) © Giuseppe Penone/2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Thomas Lannes

Thumbnail - Giuseppe Penone, Soffio, 1981. Terra-cotta, 28 ¾ × 15 ¾ × 15 ¾ inches (73 × 40 × 40 cm) © Giuseppe Penone/2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Thomas Lannes

Thumbnail - Giuseppe Penone, Senza titolo, 1983. China ink on paper on canvas, 78 ¾ × 43 ⅜ inches (200 × 110 cm) © Giuseppe Penone/2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Thomas Lannes

About

The imprint reveals the golden ratio that I have in my hands. With my eyes closed, my skin’s points of contact are endless. The hand touching the surface casts a shadow that turns into light when it is retracted and the color appears.
—Giuseppe Penone

Gagosian is pleased to announce Giuseppe Penone’s Impronte di luce / Empreintes de lumière. Opening on October 17 at 4 rue de Ponthieu, the exhibition centers on an entirely new body of paintings, unique in the artist’s more than fifty-year career. Inspired by Penone’s experience of Le Corbusier’s Couvent Sainte-Marie de La Tourette in Éveux, France, these canvases are on view alongside imprints used in their production; an artist’s book, Le Bois Sacré du Couvent de La Tourette (2022), which collects rubbings made from the building’s wood-grained concrete walls; and other graphic and sculptural works.

Penone’s complex and extended relationship with the convent—he has visited it repeatedly and exhibited there in 2022—sparked a dialogue that led to these new paintings. Working with paint—a medium to which he is a relative stranger—and making use of Le Corbusier’s sixty-three-color palette for “architectural polychromy,” the artist has again employed a process of imprinting and tracing. First stamping sections of his hands in ink on paper to generate shapes that suggest animal or human figures, he then projected the designs onto canvases, reproducing them at a larger scale in oil paint.

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From the Quarterly

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Fall 2022

The Fall 2022 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Jordan Wolfson’s House with Face (2017) on its cover.

Giuseppe Penone À La Tourette

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.

Augurs of Spring

As spring approaches in the Northern Hemisphere, Sydney Stutterheim reflects on the iconography and symbolism of the season in art both past and present.

Giuseppe Penone: By the Bay

Elizabeth Mangini writes on Giuseppe Penone’s installation of two sculptures at San Francisco’s Fort Mason.

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Spring 2020

The Spring 2020 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #412 (2003) on its cover.

Giuseppe Penone at Fort Mason

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.

Giuseppe Penone: Foglie di bronzo / Leaves of Bronze

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.

Rain of Light

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.

Visions of the Self: Jenny Saville on Rembrandt

Jenny Saville reveals the process behind her new self-portrait, painted in response to Rembrandt’s masterpiece Self-Portrait with Two Circles.

Gagosian Quarterly Talks
Giuseppe Penone and Carlos Basualdo

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.

Gagosian Quarterly Winter 2018

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.

Behind the Art
Ideas of Stone

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.