Fort Mason is a historic site within the Golden Gate National Recreation Area where hundreds of trees were planted by the military between fifty and one hundred years ago. The National Park Service (NPS) manages the cultural landscape of the site.
Bringing art into the context of our national parks not only allows us to share these spectacular and inspiring works with park visitors; Giuseppe Penone at Fort Mason invites us to take a closer look at our parks' relationship with nature through the site's history and current conservation and conservation management. (Charles Strickfaden, chief of communications, Golden Gate National Recreation Area).
From his early site-specific sculptures made in the forests around his hometown in Piedmont, Italy, Penone has adapted elements of the natural world, exploring the profound evolutionary interdependence between sculpture and nature across geological time.
The dramatic installation in the Great Meadow at Fort Mason is Penone's first public work on the West Coast. In Stone Ideas (2004), large river stones nestle in the tall branches of a bronze sculpture cast from a tree, as if weighing down the tree's natural reach towards the light. The tree is tall and straight; its narrow silhouette supporting the stones high in the air suggests a force that resists the planetary load of gravity.
A second cast bronze tree, La Logica del Vegetale (2012), lies to one side, with its gnarled root system fully exposed. Five living saplings native to California (valley oak, live oak, leaf maple, and two California laurels) will be planted at the tips of the sculpture's bare branches, allowing exuberant growth to sprout around their bronze counterpart.
Art in the Parks' mission is to provide programs that are transformative, unexpected and inspiring.
Areas protected by the National Park Service have long inspired artists; in return, park sites have used art to deepen the public's enjoyment, appreciation, and understanding of these precious natural resources.
Thus Penone's convincing sculptural investigation into the perpetual give-and-take between man and nature offers a poetic analogy with the evolution of the park itself.
Giuseppe Penone was born in 1947 in Garessio, Italy, and currently lives and works in Paris and Turin, Italy. His career began in the 60s with the Arte Povera movement in his native Italy. This radical group of artists employed unconventional “poor” elements and raw materials to challenge cultural assumptions and evoke a pre-industrial age, criticizing dehumanizing systems of industrialization and mechanization, as well as contemporary art movements. Penone's early works created in the forests around his hometown in Piedmont marked the beginning of an enduring fascination with the arboreal kingdom still prevalent in his works today. Collections include the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; Center Pompidou, Paris; and the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Exhibitions include Musée des Arts Contemporains du Grand-Hornu, Belgium (2010); Drawings and sculptures, De Pont Museum, The Netherlands (2010); 22 Works in Versailles, Château de Versailles, France (2013); Stone Ideas (Ideas of Stone), Madison Square Park, New York (2013-2014); Being the River, Repeating the Forest, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2015); Anaphora, Royal Palace of Venaria, Italy (2016); and Matrice / Matrix, Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, Rome (2017). In 2017, at the inauguration of the museum, Germination, the permanent and site specific installation by Penone for the Louvre Abu Dhabi, was presented. Penone has received numerous awards, including the Praemium Imperiale, Japan Arts Association (2014).
Information about Golden Gate National Recreation Area
The Golden Gate National Recreation Area, located in and around San Francisco, is the National Park Service's most visited park site, hosting more than 15 million visitors in 2018. A diverse park with abundant recreational opportunities, as well as natural, cultural and scenic assets, encompasses more than 82.000 acres in three counties. The park also manages two other NPS areas: Fort Point National Historic Site, a Civil War-era fort built on the northernmost point of land in San Francisco, and Muir Woods National Monument, which includes a towering stand of old-growth coastal redwoods. growth in Marin County. For more information, visit nps.gov/goga.
