Giuseppe Penone

Giuseppe Penone (born 3 April 1947, Garessio) is an Italian artist and sculptor, known for his large-scale sculptures of trees. He is interested in the link between man and the natural world. His early work is often associated with the Arte povera movement. In 2014, Penone was awarded the prestigious Praemium Imperiale award.

Works

Penone's sculptures, installations, and drawings are distinguished by his emphasis on process and his use of natural materials, such as clay, stone, metal, and wood. His work strives to assimilate the natural word with his artistic practice, unifying art and nature. Penone created his first Albero ("Tree") sculpture in 1969, a series which continues to the present.

Earliest works In Penone's first exhibition at the age of 21, a one-man show at the Deposito d'Arte Presente in Turin in 1968, he presented works made out of lead, iron, wax, pitch, wood, plaster and burlap. Two of them involved the natural action of the elements: Scala d'acqua ("Water Ladder"), in which molten pitch was sculpted with a jet of water, and Corda, pioggia, zinco. Corda, pioggia, sole ("Rope, Rain, Sun"), a structure in movement with its form was altered by weathering.

In December 1968, Penone performed a series of acts in a wood near his home, the region of the Maritime Alps. In this work, titled Alpi Marittime, Penone intervened in the growth processes of a tree, whose form retained the memory of his gesture over time. He immersed in a stream a tub of cement with the dimensions of his body on which he had left the imprints of his hands, feet and face: La mia altezza, la lunghezza delle mie braccia, il mio spessore in un ruscello ("My Height, the Length of My Arms, My Breadth in a Stream").

In 1969, Penone's works were published in the Germano Celant's seminal publication Arte Povera in a form of a sort of diary correlated with drawing, photographs and brief notes. For this work, Penone carved an existing tree down to a much smaller, more bare beam, and then created new branches so as to transport the tree back to an earlier period of its life. "The animal image, the imprint is involuntary culture. It has the intelligence of the material, a universal intelligence, an intelligence of the flesh of the material of man. The imprint of the whole epidermis of one's body, a leap into the air, a plunge into water, the body covered with earth. Developing one's skin against the air, water, earth, rock, walls, trees, dogs, handrails, windows, roads, hair, hats, handies, wings, doors, seats, stairs, clothes, books, eyes, sheep, mushrooms, grass, skin ... " wrote the artist, reflecting on the quantity of voluntary and involuntary signs that bodies disseminate and spread on different things: the neon lights in a gallery, the panes of glass in a window at the Kunsthalle in Kassel at "Documenta 5" in 1972, on a stone in Svolgere la propria pelle/pietra ("Developing One's Own Skin/Stone") of 1971, or on the fingers in Svolgere la propria pelle/dita ("Developing One's Own Skin/Finger") of the same year.

Penone's purpose is to produce the work starting from an image as automatic and unconscious as a fingerprint, and to make it conscious and voluntary through the irreplaceable action of drawing, which enlarges it and retraces it in all its art. Other examples are the cycles titled Pressione ("Pressure") begun in 1974 and Palpebre ("Eyelids") in 1975. The procedure adopted by the artist is articulated in different phases: making strips of adhesive tape adhere to his skin sprinkled with black, or pressure imprinting his own body or spreading a fine layer of resin on his eyelids and then photographing the image derived from the contact, projecting it enlarged onto paper or other surfaces, where it is transcribed in charcoal or pencil and with another act of contact, which the artist exerts by drawing. In some cases the work, which is the projection of the skin of an individual onto what is outside his body, takes on the dimension of an interior and the imprints traced on the walls of the space envelop the viewer, as in the installations he made for the exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum of Lucerne (1977), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1981), The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa (1983), or the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville in Paris (1984).

The connection between the act of contact and the process of memory became more prominent in Vaso ("Vase") of 1975. This consisted of a terracotta vase from an archeological excavation and an expansion, in four bronze sculptures, of the fingerprints left on it by the potter. Here, for the first time, Penone worked in bronze. In 1978, Penone began a series of works in clay titled Soffio ("Breath"). With these works, he reproduced the volume of the breath against his body in the form of a large clay vase, making visible a performative gesture of the artist. In this work, Penone grew potatoes inside moulds of his face, so as to make them appear like parts of his face, such as his ears and his nose. This work, titled "The Garden of Fluid Sculptures," includes fourteen sculptures made in bronze, wood, and marble and spread over several acres of the outdoor gardens. Regarding this work, he stated "My artwork shows, with the language of sculpture, the essence of matter and tries to reveal with the work, the hidden life within." These artists rejected traditional artistic languages. The appearance of Penone in this group of artists coincided with the emergence in the critical elaborations of the "magical and wonder-arousing value of the natural elements". This was at a time when dialogue and debate with the coeval international avantgardes was becoming most intense, conducted through a series of group surveys in which Penone took part. These events included Konzeption-Conception at the Schloss Morsbroich in Leverkusen in 1969, conceptual art arte povera land art at the Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna in Turin and Information at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1970.

Honours and awards 2001 of the Rolf Schock Prize, Visual Arts. 2014 Praemium Imperiale, Sculpture