Giuseppe Penone - Nelle Mani. In the Hands

By now it has become a yearly tradition for Museum De Pont to dedicate an exhibition to work on paper by an artist from the collection. In recent years consideration has been given to the drawings of Gerhard Richter, Thomas Schütte, René Daniëls, Jan Andriesse, Anton Henning and others. This summer De Pont will show works on paper by Giuseppe Penone (Garessio, 1947). These span a period of forty years and are being presented along with a number of his sculptures.

Giuseppe Penone was the youngest member of a group of Italian artists whose work was collectively named arte povera (‘poor art’) by the critic Germano Celant during the late sixties. One of the features of their art was the use of commonplace and inexpensive materials, such as rags, earth, branches and coal. The informal and lively looking artworks were indeed seen as a reaction to the increasing abstraction and dehumanization of particularly the American art of that period. The themes of arte povera involved the roots of culture and of life, various sources of energy, and especially energy as a primal force. Penone is the only artist of the group whose work was centered around nature. Even now, he continues to have an intense and obsessive interest in the vital forces of nature, in particular that of trees.

The Alberi (Trees), which Penone began producing in 1968, have become quite well known. Time and again, the irregular growth form of a tree is extracted from rectangular beams of wood or from thick, sawed-off tree trunks. By peeling away its rings and thereby following the knots, he arrives at the shape that a tree had at a certain point in its life. Once one has seen these works, the sight of an uprooted tree trunk or any wooden beam used in building will always be a reminder that many trees are actually contained in this. ‘Every year it is born again, and it stores the memory of its tree-ness within itself,’ writes Penone about the tree, and it is precisely this hidden memory which Penone is revealing.

In recent years Penone has also been working with marble. Just as he exposes the life structure hidden within wooden beams, he makes the dark veins in the marble visible by chiseling away the surrounding white stone. It is as though the cold marble possesses an organic inner life, as though the irregular black veins were the lifeblood of the stone. Unlike a scientific analyst or a pathologist, who makes a dead being even more dead, so to speak, by taking it apart, Penone brings dead matter to life. The irregular structures that are freed from the stone show a remarkable similarity to branches that have intertwined in their growth or to the anatomy of overlapping, interlacing tendons and muscles.

In Geometria nella mani (Geometry in the hands) the physical act of reaching and grasping serves as the point of departure. In this series of sculptures from 2005, the hand of the artist is holding a lump of clay, as he clasps a geometric form such as an oval, a triangle, a square and a trapezoid between his thumb and index finger. The imprint of the hand varies according to each form. In highly enlarged sculptures based on this, the space between the hand and the geometric objects becomes tangible, and the hand's grasp has taken on a monumental dimension. The imprint of the fingers gives the sculptures cast in bronze the contours of a gnarled tree stump. Added to these are the geometric forms in stainless steel, which stand out magnificently as foreign elements. Penone's visual language has a suggestive power, which stems from or is generated by the sense of touch: reality can be explored by the hand.

Giuseppe Penone
Nelle Mani. In the Hands
Kurator: Hendrik Driessen