Giuseppe Penone

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner in 2006

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is deeper and richer in the original. The illustration fails to fully convey the varied organic textures of the sculpture's surface. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Please contact the Contemporary Department for further details.
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Delicately balanced by five branches, Giuseppe Penone’s Spazio della Scultura, Pelle di Cedro beautifully presents one of the artist’s engaging casts of cedar bark. In its inventive use of materials and natural sources, the sculpture is an exquisite example of Penone’s investigations into the poetics of nature. The artist’s continuous insistence on the exploration of natural forms constitutes one of the most original and pertinent artistic expressions in an age where nature has become an increasingly rare and cultivated phenomenon.

As the youngest member of a generation of Italian artists that achieved international recognition under the label of Arte Povera, Giuseppe Penone had always been interested in natural materials. Together with many of his contemporaries, the artist proposed an art of tautology, choosing to highlight already existing natural phenomena and drawing attention to their inherent poetics and creative potential. Lo Spazio della Scultura is an outstanding example of this ethos of art beyond representation, since the bark does not represent the tree, but constitutes an indexical trace of the cedar’s skin. Making use of cedar trees that were felled by a storm in Versailles in 1999, the sculpture is the result of two iconic bodies of work which, despite their seeming simplicity, incite a profound contemplation of temporal awareness in our society. Whereas the first of the two trees was transformed back into its original state at 25 years old by peeling back the layers of its skin, Penone took the opposite approach with the second tree. Expanded by casting the outer layer of bark, and subsequently turning it into bronze sheets of its imprint, the artist effectively added an additional, though imaginary, layer of skin to the tree.

The present work, in which the cedar bark has been executed in bronze and is supported by casts of its branches, is a poetic example of the artist’s fascination with natural growth, whose slow but forceful progression often seems dangerously absent in our fast-paced society. Not only is Lo Spazio della Scultura, Pelle di Cedro therefore of a timeless aesthetic, but also a crucially important reminder of the brevity and short-lived experience of human life in the face of nature’s awe-inspiring greatness.