Introduction
Steeped in history, Giuseppe Penone’s artistic practice continuously alternates sculpture and nature. On show at the Borghese Gallery, his Gesti Universali / Universal Gestures exhibition offers visitors a chance to investigate the relationship between the representation of nature and the time of a historical past, through his gesture of inscribing organic works in a strictly mineral dimension.
Penone’s intervention is not an embellishment of a place with its own unique balance of form and architecture. Penone’s works question sculpture, its historical evolution and characteristic, unchanging vitality. The artist shapes material in a gesture that brings Man closer to Nature. A process of actualization is integral to his sculptural and installation work. The actions the artist performs have a dialectical relationship with the natural acts that shape a material, each time different, each time revealing cyclical and fantastical aspects.
Through this unique exhibition layout, Penone’s works enable us to observe matter by revealing what forms it conceals, distanced from potential formal or symbolic comparisons to the rooms where it unfolds.
Exalting these individual materials and the places hosting them, the artist brings us face to face with a kind of graft, a connection between two systems, not through domination or comparing the elements involved, but by indulging their inspirational force.
Curated by Francesco Stocchi, Universal Gestures presents thirty-six works arranged across four museum rooms (the Salone di Mariano Rossi, Sala di Apollo e Dafne, Sala degli Imperatori, and Sala di Enea e Anchise), the Bird House Garden and, exceptionally, the Giardino della Meridiana.
Outside, where bronze works strike up a relationship with the gardens, enriched with potted plants placed by the artist to support some of the works and intensify the garden’s botany, the organic in dialogue with the mineral world in the interior rooms is reversed.
Penone’s core works at the Borghese Gallery span more than forty years’ output (from 1973 to 2017) and five series: Alberi scortecciati / Barked Trees, Soffi / Breaths, Gesti vegetali / Vegetal Gestures, Spine d’acacia / Acacia Thorns and Respirare l’ombra / To Breath the Shadow. Hewing close to the concrete aspects of matter (visual, tactile, and olfactory), Penone explores the common nature of existence to reveal its magical and fantastical underpinnings. “The first and simplest idea of vitality, culture, sculpture,” investigating the proximity of human and plant nature, is a foundational element of his work.
Giuseppe Penone invites visitors to explore the temporary nature of works laid out to foster a dialogue, to forge a renewed stylistic cross-pollination of landscape and sculpture, an approach common in ancient statuary and a hallmark feature of the unique Galleria Borghese Museum.