Giuseppe Penone

Galerie Alice Pauli, Lausanne
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2005

Rome, Académie de France à Rome, Villa Medici, Giuseppe Penone, 2008, p. 27, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is deeper and richer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals there is some light oxidation scattered intermittently to the bronze patina. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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Giuseppe Penone’s Pelle di Foglie is an exquisite example of one of the artist’s recent series, created during the first decade of this century. A delicate latticework of branches emerges from the slender primary trunks, gently curved as though from the impact of the elements; yet the apparent delicacy of the sapling is belied by the use of bronze, a traditional medium with a venerable artistic pedigree. Translating quite literally to mean ‘skin of leaves,’ in Pelle di Foglie Penone effectively anthropomorphises the young tree, imbuing it with a sense of vulnerability as it stands alone against a possibly hostile world. Yet despite its seeming delicacy of form the sapling stands defiantly proud, bowed yet not remotely conquered by the environment around it, rendered inviolate in bronze. The importance of the series was emphasised by the inclusion of various examples in a major Penone exhibition at the Villa Medici in 2008, in which Pelle di Foglie adorned the gardens of the villa alongside other key examples of Penone’s work.

The fusion of traditional artistic media with natural forms has been a crucial hallmark of Penone’s career to date, in which the use of bronze has served to give permanence to diverse organic objects. Penone had been one of the key members of Arte Povera during his early career, his creative experiments with everyday materials epitomising Germano Celant’s definition of the movement as one that attempted to break down the 'dichotomy between art and life'. Patate (1977) was a witty exercise in self-portraiture: potatoes were placed in casts of the artist’s nose, mouth and ear then the corresponding shapes were immortalised in bronze; Zucche (1978-1979) repeated the experiment with pumpkins.

Although a variety of natural objects have been employed by the artist throughout his career, it is trees to which Penone has repeatedly gravitated, seeing in their endless contortions of limbs, branches and leaves a means of fulfilling his creative ideals. The artist has long been fascinated by the gradual growth and changing shape of trees as they age: one of his earliest works, Alpi Marittime, featured Penone leaving a bronze cast of his own hand clasped around a tree trunk, symbolising the union of man with nature. He returned to the work 42 years after its original conception in Continuera a crescere tranne che in quell punto – radiografica, in which he took an x-ray scan of the ancient bronze cast imprisoned within the bark of the tree; an element of his own self having become an integral part of another living organism in the intervening years. Trees act as a form of universal symbol for Penone, a recurring image that dominates his visual, olfactory and aural sensibilities. Each tree harbours its own unique history: one that the artist has sought to unlock with his extraordinary arboreal creations.

The 2004 retrospective of Penone’s work at the Pompidou Centre in Paris was dominated by the artist’s career-long investigation into the power and potential of the tree as creative muse, from his earliest Alberi – industrial timber planks that the artist had whittled and carved to release the delicate shape of a young tree locked within – through to his To Breathe the Shadow (1999), an overt appeal to the senses in which the walls of an entire room were adorned with bay leaves surrounding a bronze cast of a pair of lungs, also shaped by bay leaves. The result is a veritable homage to the artist’s greatest source of inspiration and influence throughout his career, in which Pelle di Foglie undoubtedly ranks as one of his most intriguing recent series. As the exquisite epitome of Penone’s concerns and artistic ideals throughout his career, Pelle di Foglie stands as a remarkable monument to the profoundly moving communion of the creative power of man with the extraordinary beauty of the natural world.