Giuseppe Penone exhibited at Gagosian London

LONDON - An exhibition of Giuseppe Penone’s monumental works at Gagosian London - named “Circling”.

Giuseppe Penone heightens the subtle levels of interplay between man, art, and nature through sculptures, drawings, photographs, and installations.

His style is a poetic expansion of Arte Povera’s radical break with conventional media. It emphasizes the involuntary processes of respiration, growth, and aging that are shared by man and tree.

In the forests near Garessio, Italy, the artist stunted the growth of trees with nails, metal wire, and an iron cast of his hand that gripped a living trunk, thus inserting himself into the cycles of the natural landscape.

Scrigno (Casket) [image above] (2007) is a patchwork mural of overlapping sections of weathered brown leather. Penone hammered the leather against it to impress the bark’s natural pattern and texture onto every square inch.

The artist lives and works in Paris and Turin.

Penone represented Italy in the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007): "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", he said.