PRESENTATION: Giuseppe Penone-Bodies Imprinted in the Air
In his oeuvre, Giuseppe Penone has continually expanded the parameters of art through a close examination of the interplay between the human body and nature. Since the beginning of his career in the late 1960s, as a proponent of the Arte Povera, he has employed and juxtaposed materials both ancient and modern, “raw” and manufactured.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Archive
Giuseppe Penone presents his solo exhibition “Impronte di corpi nell’aria” (Bodies Imprinted in the Air) with works made between the early 1970s and 2021. The exhibition’s title comes from a series of new sculptures in bronze and marble that evoke the growth of plant life out of stone, as though from earth. Penone’s early work is marked by an elemental simplicity. Investigating primary materials in his immediate surroundings, he often staged interventions in the forests around his Piedmont hometown. Arte Povera, distinguished by the use of “poor” and unconventional materials such as plant and vegetable matter, questioned cultural assumptions through the evocation of a preindustrial age. In critiquing the dehumanizing effects of mechanization, the movement countered other art genres, both earlier and contemporaneous, such as Surrealism, Pop, and Minimalism. Penone frequently incorporates his own body and gestures into his work: the photographs “Libro / polvere trappola / mano” and “Guanti” (both 1972)—the earliest in the exhibition—show the artist’s hand. The motif recurs in more recent works such as “Rotazione” (2020), which depicts a hand in the act of making multiple imprints. In later works, the artist alludes to his bodily form less directly; in wall-mounted marble slabs such as “Pelle di marmo – oro” (2006), veinlike networks blur the divide between animal and mineral, and emphasizing the transformative natural processes of birth and growth, death and decay.
Born in the small city of Garessio near Turin, Giuseppe Penone studied at the Accademia di Belle Arte in Turin and was exposed to a variety of post-war art during his early twenties. He started practicing as a professional artist in 1968 in the Garessio forest, and quickly became known as a younger member of the Arte Povera movement. The trajectory of Penone’s career reveals that his works have always been deeply concerned with the relationship between man and nature. Instead of simply accepting the model of producing installations and two-dimensional works to be displayed in museums and galleries, he walked into the woods and became an artist who focused more on the actions and procedures of transforming natural elements in both assimilative and interventional ways, to relate them to concrete, visual, tactile, or even olfactory experiences. Later, as he shifted toward conventional exhibition spaces and more orthodox sculptural materials like wood, bronze, and marble, the unremitting devotion towards nature (especially arboreal nature) remained, and still thrives today.
Photo: Giuseppe Penone, Impronte di corpi nell’aria (Bodies Imprinted in the Air), 2021, White carrara marble and bronze, 100 x 150 x 14 cm, © 2021 Giuseppe Penone / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris, Courtesy Gagosian
Info: Gagosian Gallery, 22 Anapiron Polemou Street, Athens, Greece, Duration: 16/9-13/11/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sat 11:00-19:00, Thu 11:00-20:00, https://gagosian.com/
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