ART-PRESENTATION: Giuseppe Penone-Foglie di Pietra

The exhibition “Between Man and Matter”, (10-30/5/70) at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum helped Giuseppe Penone to be established as a major figure of Arte Povera, one of Europe’s most significant contemporary art movements. In sculptures, drawings, photographs, and installations, Giuseppe Penone heightens the subtle levels of interplay between man, art, and nature.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Gallery Archive

Giuseppe Penone’s exhibition “Foglie di Pietra” at the Gagosian Gallery in Hong Kong includes key works from the last decade. Engaging with, and subtly intervening in nature so as to reimagine it in artificial terms, Penone finds ever new ways to mark the persistence of biological life, harmonizing elemental occurrences in terms of his own artistic drive. In each work, he reveals the innate sculptural qualities of natural materials, chiseling marble and casting from nature to expose the deep patterns of growth and time. “A tree trunk of marble, of calcium, encloses, in our thought, the carbon, the plant, and the plant the camouflage of the color of the bronze, and the color of the bronze, the green of the foliage and the trees, the flowing of the material, of water, of rivers in which there courses the subterranean life of the world, of the veins whose flow is enclosed in our body as in the marble cave of the mountains”, he said. In the current exhibition, “Riflesso del Bronzo” is a wall-mounted work in eight parts, where each dimly reflective, excoriated bronze plaque, successively cast from its immediate predecessor, is, literally, a mirror to time and process. The connection between act and contact, trace and imprint is further explored in “Spine d’acacia-Contatto, aprile”, where Penone painstakingly attached thousands of sharp thorns onto paneled canvas in sweeping whorls. At the center of the composition emerges the impression of a huge pair of lips, as if pressed directly on the canvas in visceral relation with nature. The tree and its relationship to man is among Penone’s most enduring subjects and a seemingly inexhaustible source of inspiration. A series of works “Indistinti Confine”, with their individual subtitles citing ancient Italian rivers, are bare tree trunks on pedestals, carved with astonishing veracity in ghostly white marble, into which Penone has embedded rusting iron nails and bronze knots. These metal elements eventually leach into and stain the marble, so the work appears to be alive in a sense. “Foglie di pietra”, from which the exhibition takes its title, is a series of sculptures in which tall splints of delicate cast bronze tree branches cradle found fragments of 18th Century ornamental stonework inspired by vegetal forms, a meditation on the endurance of nature beyond the passage of manmade culture and history. His work represents a poetic expansion of Arte Povera’s radical break with conventional media, and emphasizes the involuntary processes of respiration, growth, and aging that are shared by man and tree.

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 7/F Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central, Hong Kong, Duration: 21/1-12/3/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.gagosian.com