Penone uses objects from the natural world to document the interwoven relationship between man and nature evolving over a macroscopic and geological timeline.
Penone's early works included site-specific sculptures located in the woods around his Piedmontese city – the beginning of a decades-long fascination with the tree that is still prevalent in his works today.
This exhibition will present a selection of works in bronze, stone and marble that illustrate Penone's ability to seamlessly transpose man-made and natural patterns. In Tea Leaves (2008), a pair of branch-shaped bronze lungs emerge from a wall of wire-grid tea leaves, creating a direct link between plant respiration and the inhalation and exhalation of human breath . Free-standing sculptures such as the cast bronze foliage of Thoughts of Leaves (2014–17) they compare the traces made by the artist's hand with the weathering and degenerative marks made on plants and minerals as they are left to the elements.
In a group of works on paper from 2015 to 16 in watercolour, coffee and pencil, Penone further explores the points of connection and simultaneous separation placed in the organic geometries of Pensieri di Foglie. The suspended marble slabs of Corpo di pietra – rami (2016), in which bronze twigs extend from the white veined stone, suggest the slow growth of one element from another. Penone positions time as a transformative agent, using poetic and indicative markup to painstakingly trace involuntary processes such as respiration, growth and aging. It blurs the distinction between human, botanical and mineral life, giving shape to their coexistence.
Giuseppe Penone was born in 1947 in Garessio, Italy and lives and works in Paris and Turin, Italy. Collections include Louvre Abu Dhabi; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Museum of Modern Art, New York. 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); Saluti croisés, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne, Switzerland (2016); Anaphora, Royal Palace of Venaria, Italy (2016); Matrix / Matrix, Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, Rome (2017); and A Tree in the Woods, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, England (2018). In 2017, Germination, a site-specific permanent sculptural installation by Penone for the Louvre Abu Dhabi, was presented at the museum's opening.
