Biography
Giuseppe Penone was born in Garessio, near Cuneo, in 1947. He lives and works in Turin. He began exhibiting in 1968, after studying art at the Turin Accademia di Belle Arti, becoming part of the Arte Povera group and focusing his research on nature and its transformational processes. Penone studied in Turin, the Italian city best known for FIAT, which at that time was at its most industrial and where, not surprisingly, the country’s student movement and workers’ protests initially emerged. Although Penone enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts, he found his main stimuli in art galleries. Reacting to the political and social context, he ended up rejecting traditional art techniques and locations and chose to return to nature to work. For him, the Maritime Alps were his true place of formation and inspiration, where he was able to establish an artistic exchange with the environment, where the creative subject was part of the environment.
He undertook photographically documented actions to visualize and modify natural growth processes (Alpi Marittime / Maritime Alps, 1968; the Alberi / Tree cycle from 1969; the Gesti vegetali / Vegetal Gestures series from 1984). The artist also investigated the human body and its relations with the external environment, working with photographs, projections, impressions and casts of anatomical parts in various materials (Svolgere la propria pelle / To Unroll One’s Skin, from 1970; Pressione / Pressure, from 1974; Palpebre / Eyelids, from 1978).
In subsequent works, Penone explored contact between body and matter (the Soffi / Breaths series, from 1978), presenting, modified, enlarged or graphically elaborated parts or imprints of the human body (the Propagazioni / Propagations, Terre d’ombra and Anatomie / Anatomies series, from the mid-1990s). The tree, which Penone considers “the first and simplest idea of vitality, culture, sculpture”, is a key element of his work. Inspired by the idea of his Ripetere il bosco / Repeating the Forest, Penone has fashioned a large number of tree variations over the years. He has juxtaposed a variety of different Trees at a number of exhibitions, from the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1980 to the Castello di Rivoli (Turin) in 1991 and, in 2008, the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto.
Sometimes accompanied by poetic texts of his own writing, his work has been exhibited at a great many national and international exhibitions. In 2007, he represented Italy at the 52nd Venice Biennale; in 2013, he exhibited in the Gardens of the Palace of Versailles; he has had solo exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2004–05, 2022–23), the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (2016), the BNF in Paris (2021), and in 2022 at the Frick Collection in New York with Propagazioni: Giuseppe Penone at Sèvres, as well as at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.