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Giuseppe Penone

Circling

April 11–May 31, 2014
Britannia Street, London

Giuseppe Penone, Propagazione 23-05-012, 2012 Printing ink and permanent ink on Japanese paper mounted on canvas, 53 9/16 × 78 7/16 inches (136 × 199.3 cm)© Archivio Penone, photo by Mike Bruce

Giuseppe Penone, Propagazione 23-05-012, 2012

Printing ink and permanent ink on Japanese paper mounted on canvas, 53 9/16 × 78 7/16 inches (136 × 199.3 cm)
© Archivio Penone, photo by Mike Bruce

Giuseppe Penone, Propagazione 23-05-012, 2012 (detail) Printing ink and permanent ink on Japanese paper mounted on canvas, 53 9/16 × 78 7/16 inches (136 × 199.3 cm)© Archivio Penone, photo by Mike Bruce

Giuseppe Penone, Propagazione 23-05-012, 2012 (detail)

Printing ink and permanent ink on Japanese paper mounted on canvas, 53 9/16 × 78 7/16 inches (136 × 199.3 cm)
© Archivio Penone, photo by Mike Bruce

Giuseppe Penone, Sigillo, 2012 White Carrara marble, 19 ⅞ × 779 ½ × 159 7/16 inches (50.5 × 1,980 × 405 cm)© Archivio Penone

Giuseppe Penone, Sigillo, 2012

White Carrara marble, 19 ⅞ × 779 ½ × 159 7/16 inches (50.5 × 1,980 × 405 cm)
© Archivio Penone

Giuseppe Penone, Matrice di bronzo, 2008 Bronze, Gold, and resin, 46 7/16 × 85 13/16 × 74 × 13/16 inches (118 × 218 × 190 cm)© Archivio Penone, photo by Mike Bruce

Giuseppe Penone, Matrice di bronzo, 2008

Bronze, Gold, and resin, 46 7/16 × 85 13/16 × 74 × 13/16 inches (118 × 218 × 190 cm)
© Archivio Penone, photo by Mike Bruce

Giuseppe Penone, Matrice di bronzo, 2008 (detail) Bronze, Gold, and resin, 46 7/16 × 85 13/16 × 74 × 13/16 inches (118 × 218 × 190 cm)© Archivio Penone, photo by Mike Bruce

Giuseppe Penone, Matrice di bronzo, 2008 (detail)

Bronze, Gold, and resin, 46 7/16 × 85 13/16 × 74 × 13/16 inches (118 × 218 × 190 cm)
© Archivio Penone, photo by Mike Bruce

Giuseppe Penone, Scrigno, 2007 Leather, bronze, gold, and resin, Overall Dimensions Variable, edition of 4© Archivio Penone, photo by Mike Bruce

Giuseppe Penone, Scrigno, 2007

Leather, bronze, gold, and resin, Overall Dimensions Variable, edition of 4
© Archivio Penone, photo by Mike Bruce

Giuseppe Penone, Scrigno, 2007 (detail) Leather, bronze, gold, and resin, Overall Dimensions Variable, edition of 4© Archivio Penone, photo by Mike Bruce

Giuseppe Penone, Scrigno, 2007 (detail)

Leather, bronze, gold, and resin, Overall Dimensions Variable, edition of 4
© Archivio Penone, photo by Mike Bruce

Giuseppe Penone, Pelle di marmo e spine d'acacia—Marta, 2006 Carrara marble, canvas, acrylic, glass microspheres, acacia thorns, 39 ⅜ × 55 ⅛ × 2 ⅜ inches (100 × 140 × 6 cm)© Archivio Penone, photo by Mike Bruce

Giuseppe Penone, Pelle di marmo e spine d'acacia—Marta, 2006

Carrara marble, canvas, acrylic, glass microspheres, acacia thorns, 39 ⅜ × 55 ⅛ × 2 ⅜ inches (100 × 140 × 6 cm)
© Archivio Penone, photo by Mike Bruce

Giuseppe Penone, Pelle di marmo e spine d'acacia—Marta, 2006 (detail) Carrara marble, canvas, acrylic, glass microspheres, acacia thorns, 39 ⅜ × 55 ⅛ × 2 ⅜ inches (100 × 140 × 6 cm)© Archivio Penone, photo by Mike Bruce

Giuseppe Penone, Pelle di marmo e spine d'acacia—Marta, 2006 (detail)

Carrara marble, canvas, acrylic, glass microspheres, acacia thorns, 39 ⅜ × 55 ⅛ × 2 ⅜ inches (100 × 140 × 6 cm)
© Archivio Penone, photo by Mike Bruce

Giuseppe Penone, Pelle di marmo e spine d'acacia—Livia, 2006 Pink marble, canvas, silk, acacia thorns, 39 ⅜ × 139 ¾ × 2 ⅜ inches (100 × 355 × 6 cm)© Archivio Penone, photo by Mike Bruce

Giuseppe Penone, Pelle di marmo e spine d'acacia—Livia, 2006

Pink marble, canvas, silk, acacia thorns, 39 ⅜ × 139 ¾ × 2 ⅜ inches (100 × 355 × 6 cm)
© Archivio Penone, photo by Mike Bruce

Giuseppe Penone, Pelle di marmo e spine d'acacia—Livia, 2006 (detail) Pink marble, canvas, silk, acacia thorns, 39 ⅜ × 139 ¾ × 2 ⅜ inches (100 × 355 × 6 cm)© Archivio Penone, photo by Mike Bruce

Giuseppe Penone, Pelle di marmo e spine d'acacia—Livia, 2006 (detail)

Pink marble, canvas, silk, acacia thorns, 39 ⅜ × 139 ¾ × 2 ⅜ inches (100 × 355 × 6 cm)
© Archivio Penone, photo by Mike Bruce

About

What fascinates me about trees is their structure: the tree is a being that memorializes the feats of its existence in its very form. Similarly, our bodies could be considered the sum of the performance of our existence. The tree can be considered a metaphor for the work of a sculptor who fixes his actions in the material.
—Giuseppe Penone

Gagosian London is pleased to present “Circling,” an exhibition of Giuseppe Penone’s monumental works Scrigno (Casket) (2007) and Sigillo (Seal) (2008).

In sculptures, drawings, photographs, and installations, Giuseppe Penone heightens the subtle levels of interplay between man, art, and nature. 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. During the late 1960s, in the forests near Garessio, Italy, he stunted the growth of trees with nails, metal wire, and an iron cast of his hand that gripped a living trunk, thus insinuating himself into the cycles of the natural landscape. In the early 1970s, he continued to harness the innate attributes of his body by drawing the patterns of his skin and casting his face in plaster. In To Reverse One’s Eyes (1970), he was photographed wearing mirrored contact lenses, positing vision as the precise point of separation between self and environment.

In each of the large-scale works that comprise the exhibition, an artistic gesture is crafted upon a natural foundation. Sigillo (Seal) (2008)—which was included in Penone's major installation at Château de Versailles in 2013—is a horizontal veined marble slab almost twenty meters in length. Across its mid-point, a solid cylinder of the same marble evokes the ancient Babylonian seals used to make impressions in clay, linking a man-made tool to the endless swirling pattern that was in fact produced by geological events over millions of years. Scrigno (Casket) (2007) is a patchwork mural of overlapping sections of weathered brown leather. Moving around a living tree, Penone hammered the leather against it to impress the bark’s natural pattern and texture onto every square inch. Across the center of this vast work, which measures approximately fifteen meters in width, lies a small tree cast in bronze, split open to reveal its rich resin interior. Engaging with and subtly intervening in the natural world so as to reimagine it, Penone finds ever new ways to harmonize elemental occurrences with his own artifice.

Giuseppe Penone was born in 1947 in Garessio, Italy. He lives and works in Paris and Turin. Public collections include Tate Gallery, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Musée d´Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; MAXXI, Rome; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2004); Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Toyota, Japan (2008); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, United Kingdom (2009); Musée des Arts Contemporains, Grand-Hornu, Belgium (2011); Documenta 13, Kassel (2012); "The Bloomberg Commission: Giuseppe Penone," Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2012); “Penone Versailles,” Château de Versailles, France (2013); Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2013); and Madison Square Park, New York (2013–14). Penone co-represented Italy in the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007).

Jordan Wolfson’s House with Face (2017) on the cover of Gagosian Quarterly, Fall 2022

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Fall 2022

The Fall 2022 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Jordan Wolfson’s House with Face (2017) on its cover.

Photograph of the execution of Giuseppe Penone’s frottages in La Tourette, Éveux, France. Giuseppe Penone, Le Bois Sacré (The Sacred Forest), 2022, prepared canvas oil and wax pastel

Giuseppe Penone À La Tourette

Le Couvent Sainte-Marie de La Tourette, in Éveux, France, is both an active Dominican priory and the last building designed by Le Corbusier. As a result, the priory, completed in 1961, is a center both religious and architectural, a site of spiritual significance and a magnetic draw for artists, writers, architects, and others. This fall, at the invitation of Frère Marc Chauveau, Giuseppe Penone will be exhibiting a selection of existing sculptures at La Tourette alongside new work directly inspired by the context and materials of the building. Here, Penone and Frère Chauveau discuss the power and peculiarities of the space, as well as the artwork that will be exhibited there.

Augurs of Spring

Augurs of Spring

As spring approaches in the Northern Hemisphere, Sydney Stutterheim reflects on the iconography and symbolism of the season in art both past and present.

Giuseppe Penone, Idee di pietra (Ideas of Stone), 2004, installation view, Fort Mason, San Francisco, 2019–2021.

Giuseppe Penone: By the Bay

Elizabeth Mangini writes on Giuseppe Penone’s installation of two sculptures at San Francisco’s Fort Mason.

The cover of the Spring 2020 edition of the Gagosian Quarterly magazine. A Cindy Sherman photograph of herself dressed as a clown against a rainbow background.

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Spring 2020

The Spring 2020 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #412 (2003) on its cover.

Still from the video Giuseppe Penone at Fort Mason showing the artist's 2004 sculpture Idee di pietra (Ideas of Stone) installed at Fort Mason in San Francisco.

Giuseppe Penone at Fort Mason

An outdoor installation by Giuseppe Penone in San Francisco’s historic Fort Mason features two life-size bronze sculptures cast from fallen trees. The project continues the artist’s long investigation of the perpetual give-and-take between humans and nature. In this video, Penone discusses what drew him to this landscape and the concepts behind the installation.