“All my work is basically a reflection on sculpture, understood not as a choice of one material or some materials and then an elaboration of forms, but as an attempt to understand reality through this word, through this process”
Giuseppe Penone
Ever since his first works, created at the end of the 1960s when he joined the Arte Povera movement, Giuseppe Penone has placed the process of implementation and investigation into the common essence that unites man and nature at the centre of his research: it is the actions performed by the artist in a dialectical relationship with those of nature that give form to a material that is different each time, revealing its intrinsic poetics. Rejecting the rhetoric of art as depiction, the artist finds his dogma in tautology: “matter is there, it has its own value as such and represents itself”... “the choice of matter for sculpture stems from the need to make form permanent”.
Giuseppe Penone (Garessio (Cuneo, Italy), 1947) lives and works in Turin. In recent years he has had solo exhibitions at the Saarlandmuseum, Moderne Galerie, Saarbrücken (2020), Centre Pompidou Metz (2020), Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield (2018), Château La Coste, Le Puy-Sainte-Reparade (2017), Palazzo della Civiltà, Rome (2017), Louvre Abu Dhabi (2017), MART, Rovereto (2016), Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (2016), Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2015) and Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne (2015). In 2014 he exhibited his monumental sculptures at the Boboli Gardens in Florence and at Madison Square Park, New York, and in 2013 in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles. He has produced numerous permanent installations, including the Giardino delle Sculture Fluide at the Reggia della Venaria Reale, Turin. Awarded the McKim Medal in 2017 and the Praemium Imperiale for Sculpture by the Japan Art Association in 2014, he represented Italy at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007, having also exhibited there in 1995, 1986, 1980 and 1978. He has taken part in Documenta in Kassel in 1972, 1982, 1987 and 2012.
www.giuseppepenone.com