News / Giuseppe Penone

Closed

Giuseppe Penone in
Saint Francis of Assisi

May 6–July 30, 2023
National Gallery, London
www.nationalgallery.org.uk

Through art from the thirteenth century to the present day, this exhibition examines why Saint Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) remains a figure of enormous relevance to our time. From early medieval panels, relics, and manuscripts to contemporary films, paintings, sculpture, and a Marvel comic, the exhibition shines a light on how the saint has captured the imagination of artists throughout the centuries, and how his appeal has transcended generations, continents, and different religious traditions. Work by Giuseppe Penone is included.

Closed

Giuseppe Penone
Gesti universali

March 14–July 9, 2023
Galleria Borghese, Rome
galleriaborghese.beniculturali.it

Curated by Francesco Stocchi, this exhibition, whose title translates to Universal Gestures, features more than thirty works created by Giuseppe Penone between the 1970s and the early 2000s. Installed in both the ground-floor rooms and gardens of the Galleria Borghese, the sculptures highlight a symbiosis between built and natural forms, underlining the fluidity that unites all plant, human, and mineral elements. The exhibition proposes a new reading of the relationship between landscape and sculpture embodied in the museum’s collection of work by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680).

Closed

De la nature

October 22, 2022–March 19, 2023
Musée de Grenoble, France
www.museedegrenoble.fr

This exhibition, whose title translates to Of Nature, explores the work of four artists whose practices examine one of the major subjects of the twenty-first century: the relationship between humans and nature. Ecological awareness on a planetary scale is in the process of upsetting systems of thought in economics, politics, and culture. Work by Cristina Iglesias and Giuseppe Penone is included.

Closed

Giuseppe Penone
Dessins

October 19, 2022–March 6, 2023
Centre Pompidou, Paris
www.centrepompidou.fr

In 2020, Giuseppe Penone made a substantial donation to the Centre Pompidou in Paris: 328 drawings covering fifty years of creation, from 1967 to 2019. This exhibition presents 241 drawings from his gift, displayed thematically rather than in chronological order, to convey the importance of serial work. Six sculptures are shown alongside the drawings, showcasing all of Penone’s favorite materials: wood, clay, stone, leaves, and bronze. 

Closed

River of Forms
Giuseppe Penone’s Drawings

September 24, 2022–February 26, 2023
Philadelphia Museum of Art
philamuseum.org

River of Forms, curated by Carlos Basualdo, examines the central role that drawing plays in Giuseppe Penone’s practice and how it informs many of his large sculptural works from the 1960s until today. Celebrating the artist’s recent gift of drawings and artist’s books to the museum, this exhibition of nearly two hundred works on paper and a selection of sculptures reflects Penone’s extraordinary range of techniques and materials, and his belief in art as a means of understanding our place in the world.

Closed

Giuseppe Penone

October 8, 2022–January 29, 2023
Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands
www.voorlinden.nl

Throughout his fifty-year career, Giuseppe Penone, a protagonist of Arte Povera, has explored respiration, growth, and aging—among other involuntary processes—to create an expansive body of work that includes sculpture, performance, works on paper, and photography. This retrospective exhibition features both early and recent work by Penone.

Closed

Giuseppe Penone in
Renverser ses yeux: Autour de l’arte povera 1960–1975: photographie, film, vidéo

October 11, 2022–January 29, 2023
Jeu de Paume and Le Bal, Paris
jeudepaume.org

For the first time, Jeu de Paume and Le Bal in Paris present a joint thematic exhibition on the use of media—photography, film, and video—by Italian artists of the 1960s and early 1970s. This show, whose title translates to Reversing the Eye: Arte Povera and Beyond, 1960–75: Photography, Film, Video, provides an overview of the visual experiments of the Arte Povera group and other members of the Italian avant-garde. Work by Giuseppe Penone is included.

Closed

Giuseppe Penone à La Tourette

September 6–December 24, 2022
Couvent de La Tourette, Éveux, France
www.couventdelatourette.fr

Invited to show at Couvent de La Tourette, the monastery designed by Le Corbusier in Éveux, France, Giuseppe Penone executed in situ a series of rubbings of the building’s walls, creating a group of frottages and a limited-edition book. Included in the exhibition as well are older and recent works that explore a dialogue between architecture and nature.

Closed

Propagazioni
Giuseppe Penone at Sèvres

March 17–August 28, 2022
Frick Madison, New York
www.frick.org

This one-room installation of work by Giuseppe Penone is displayed at Frick Madison within the broader context of the museum’s collection of decorative arts, old master paintings, and sculpture. Consisting of eleven porcelain disks created during Penone’s 2013 collaboration with the Sèvres porcelain manufactory in France, the work, which has never before been shown publicly, invites a dialogue with the Frick’s rich holdings in the medium.

Frick Madison is the Frick Collection’s temporary home in New York’s iconic Breuer building on the corner of Madison Avenue and 75th Street during the renovation of its own buildings.

Closed

Giuseppe Penone
Art Club #34

December 17, 2021–February 27, 2022
Villa Medici–Académie de France à Rome
www.villamedici.it

As part of its Art Club exhibition series curated by Pier Paolo Pancotto, nine works by Giuseppe Penone are on view at Villa Medici in Rome, including five sculptures in terra-cotta and bronze and a video. In the exhibition, conceived for the private rooms of Cardinal Ferdinando de Medici, Penone aims to highlight the singularity of these intimate spaces by presenting emblematic works that question the material and the concept of sculpture.

Closed

Giuseppe Penone
Sève et pensée

October 12, 2021–January 23, 2022
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris
www.bnf.fr

Sève et pensée (Sap and Thought), an exhibition at the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s François-Mitterand location, centers on Giuseppe Penone’s spectacular installation Pensieri e linfa (Sap and Thought) (2021), produced especially for the site, which features a frottage rubbing of a 30-meter-long acacia tree trunk on a length of canvas. Handwritten text by the artist runs along both sides of the imprint. Also included are previously unseen works, drawings, photographs, and books, as well as a series of eighteen recent prints that Penone has gifted to the library.

Closed

Giuseppe Penone
Alberi In-Versi

July 6–October 3, 2021
Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy
www.uffizi.it

This exhibition of Giuseppe Penone’s work, whose title translates to In-verse Trees, includes over thirty drawings, photographs, sculptures, and installations. Presented as part of a yearlong celebration honoring the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri, on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of his death, the exhibition is inspired by the plant symbolism in “Paradiso,” the third and final part of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Earlier in the year Penone’s monumental sculpture Abete (Fir) (2013) was installed in the Piazza della Signoria in anticipation of this exhibition.