Gagosian Beverly Hills presents Giuseppe Penone’s first major exhibition on the West Coast.

In sculptures, drawings, photographs, and installations, Penone heightens the subtle levels of interplay between man, art, and nature. His work represents a poetic expansion of Arte Povera’s radical break with conventional media in favor of organic and accessible matter, and emphasizes the involuntary processes of respiration, growth, and aging that are shared by man and tree. During the late 1960s in the forests near Garessio, Italy, Penone stunted the growth of trees with nails, metal wire, and an iron cast of his hand that gripped a living trunk, thus insinuating himself into the cycles of the landscape. He continued to engage his own body in the early 1970s by drawing the textures of his skin and casting his face in plaster; in To Reverse One’s Eyes (1970), he was photographed wearing mirrored contact lenses, positing vision as the precise point of separation between self and environment. In recent years, Penone has taken the natural attributes of traditional sculptural media, including wood, bronze, and marble, as points of departure for the creation of monumental, tactile forms.

The exhibition takes its title from a passage in John Keats’s poem Ode to Psyche (1819), an anecdotal narrative of love, nature, and the creative imagination. Each work is a revelation of the sculptural qualities innate to natural materials. Penone chisels cedar trunks and masses of marble to expose the deep patterns resulting from growth and time, characteristics that he further emphasizes through carving, patination, and replication. In Anatomia / Anatomy (2011), a 23-ton marble block, he reconceives the veined surface as a matrix of tendrils, advancing the original marks into multiple dimensions.

The tree and its relationship to man is among Penone’s most enduring subjects. Albero Porta–Cedro / Door Tree–Cedar (2012), which was part of the artist’s major installation at Château de Versailles in 2013, is a natural trunk with a rectangular cavity that reveals a carving of the heartwood within, a window onto the plant’s former life. Luce zenitale / Zenithal Light (2012), a tree trunk mimetically rendered in cast bronze, also contains a veiled interior dimension coated in shimmering gold leaf, while the exterior retains Penone’s fingerprints as subtle records of the manmade sculpting process. In Spine d’acacia–Contatto, aprile 2006 / Acacia Thorns–Contact, April 2006, he revisits an organic medium that has informed his work since the 1990s: hundreds of thorns are attached to twelve canvases in patterns forming an intricate yet massive impression of lips, another visceral meditation on human and natural contact. Engaging with and subtly intervening in nature so as to reimagine it in artificial manmade terms, Penone finds ever new ways to harmonize elemental occurrences with his own artistic drive.

Penone was awarded the Praemium Imperiale by the Japan Art Association in 2014.

-Gagosian Gallery

Image: © Archivio Penone