Giuseppe Penone

Giuseppe Penone was born in 1947 in Garessio, in the province of Cuneo, and attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Turin. In 1967, he joined the Arte Povera movement, so called by the art historian Germano Celant, and in 1968 took part in his first exhibition, at the Deposito d’Arte Presente, bringing works made with unusual materials and involving the natural intervention of the elements.

In the years between 1968-69, Giuseppe Penone began experimenting, in the Garessio forest, with human intervention in trees, with the idea that the tree, although apparently solid, is a plastic material in its growth process. His intention was to “indicate the matter of the tree as a form in the process of becoming, bypassing the conventional aspect of its matter”. In 1981 Penone created installations for solo exhibitions at the MoMA in New York and, in 1984, at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Some of his works are part of the permanent collection of MAXXI in Rome and his work Foglie di Luce, in 2016, is among the first to enter the permanent collection of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi.