Giuseppe Penone

Giuseppe Penone was the youngest of a group of Italian artists who gained renown as part of the arte povera (‘poor art’) movement in the late 1960s. They created art using inexpensive everyday materials such as rags, dirt, branches and coal. Their work was a response to the increasing abstraction and dehumanization of art – and American art in particular – at the time.

While Penone is most famous as a sculptor, he also makes installations, paintings, photos, works on paper and performances. His art often emerges through direct physical contact with the natural world. Among his best-known works are the Alberi (Trees), which Penone has been making since 1968 and which formed the centrepiece of a 2010 exhibition in De Pont Museum (see Nelle Mani - In the Hands). In these sculptures, he attempts to capture the growth stages of trees in three dimensions by freeing the original form from the surrounding wood – just as Michelangelo freed his angels from marble (for a sketch of one of these works, see: Passi Sulle Cime Dei Gelsi / Footsteps on Mulberry Tree Tops). 

While the arte povera artists’ work dealt with the roots of culture and daily life, with various sources of energy and energy as a primal force, Penone is the only one for whom the natural world itself remained the primary motif. He sees nature as a combination of phenomena and transformative processes leading to results that must be analysed. His work deals with the desire to unite man and nature, two entities which have become deeply estranged in Western civilization. He constantly endeavours to achieve physical, sensual and poetic contact between the two, see for instance Untitled, 1991. Penone’s attention to unadulterated materials, the symbiosis with nature and the purity of organic processes made him an artist ahead of his time.