Giuseppe Penone: Impronte di luce / Empreintes de lumière

The imprint reveals the golden ratio that I have in my hands. With my eyes closed, my skin’s points of contact are endless. The hand touching the surface casts a shadow that turns into light when it is retracted and the color appears. —Giuseppe Penone

The exhibition centres on an entirely new body of paintings, unique in the artist’s more than fifty-year career. Inspired by Penone’s experience of Le Corbusier’s Couvent Sainte-Marie de La Tourette in Éveux, France, these canvases are on view alongside imprints used in their production; an artist’s book, Le Bois Sacré du Couvent de La Tourette (2022), which collects rubbings made from the building’s wood-grained concrete walls; and other graphic and sculptural works.

Penone’s complex and extended relationship with the convent—he has visited it repeatedly and exhibited there in 2022—sparked a dialogue that led to these new paintings. Working with paint—a medium to which he is a relative stranger—and making use of Le Corbusier’s sixty-three-color palette for “architectural polychromy,” the artist has again employed a process of imprinting and tracing. First stamping sections of his hands in ink on paper to generate shapes that suggest animal or human figures, he then projected the designs onto canvases, reproducing them at a larger scale in oil paint.