Garden of the Birdhouse
In the 1980s, Giuseppe Penone devoted himself wholly to sculpture using the traditional materials of wax, wood, plaster, earth, bronze, stone and marble. A perception of “the extreme precariousness of the concept of solid, fluid, hard, soft, positive, negative” guided the artist in his interception of forms, enabling revelations about the state of matter and its transformational dynamics.
In Vegetal Gestures, the idea of fossilizing movement is key to the sculptural process, propagating an idea of “building a giant, human-scale leaf” in which “the sculptor is like a plant, repeating gestures that, fixed and superimposed, generate that plant’s presence in space.”
The first bronze Vegetal Gesture is a female body modelled on a life-size mannequin. The artist’s gestures were shaped using clay, a material that registers the artist’s imprints, from which casting dies were taken. Bronze, the material of choice for Vegetal Gestures, allows for the closest approximation of a tree trunk’s natural appearance. In 1980, Penone wrote: “Using bronze, plant life retains all its appearance and, when placed outdoors, reacts with the climate, oxidizing, taking on the same colours as plants around it, its patina a synthesis of the landscape.” The artist believes that fossilizing gestures “that have developed in a particular space” is an operation that “brings man closer to plants, forced to live eternally under the weight of their ‘gestures’ of lived experience”. By no means coincidentally, the gestures he chose are entirely ordinary movements: “using gestures taken for granted, real, normal, the heroic spirit of the work of art is tempered, the example of the sacred mundane that lies in all things.”