In Giuseppe Penone’s Sculptures, Humankind and Nature Are One

For well over half a century, trees have been Giuseppe Penone’s muse and medium—or, as he puts it, “the perfect sculptures.” Housed in a concrete-floor, former 1950s metals warehouse along Turin’s Dora Riparia River, his studio has cinderblock walls, thirty-six-foot ceilings, and a bridge crane to accommodate the timber beams and carved wooden trunks for which the artist is known. A majestic, double-height spiraling steel-and-oak staircase, designed by Penone when he renovated the space in 1994, is its own sculptural centerpiece. He’s only a fifteen-minute walk from the center of town, and an upstairs two-bedroom flat serves as a pied-à-terre. “There is no separation between life and work for this man,” says Pepi Marchetti Franchi, founding director of Gagosian Rome.

It is here that Penone has been preparing The Reflection of Bronze, an exhibition celebrating the metal he’s been casting for decades, on view from April 22 through July 2 at Gagosian’s New York flagship. The presentation, curated by Adam D. Weinberg, former director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, delivers a mini survey of the legendary sculptor with eighteen artworks, spanning from 1995 to the present. Over the past eighteen months, Weinberg (who retired in 2023 after a 20-year museum tenure) made multiple visits to Penone’s studio and foundry to understand his fabrication method. “Sculpture is very different from painting. It’s a long process,” Penone tells me. “There’s a lot of action that’s not visible until the final result. I compare it to agriculture, where you put a grain in the soil and after it grows, you don’t see it anymore. The big difference with painting is that the painting itself becomes the expression.”

A week before the opening, Gagosian pulses with the din of drills and scissor lifts. Weinberg and Penone are inspecting Marsia (Marsyas), a sculpture from 2024 consisting of a pair of life-size, inverted bronze limbs hanging in the middle of the gallery. It is inspired by mythology and a painting by Titian, Flaying of Marsyas, named after the satyr who challenges Apollo to a musical contest, loses, and is skinned alive while tied to a pine. Penone’s dangling, hollowed-out branches evoke Marsyas’s fate.

The exhibition is laid out in a three-room sequence, and the first space is already paneled in floor-to-ceiling sheets of cork; the aim is to create a sensory immersion akin to being in a forest. It takes nine years for a tree’s bark to regenerate, says Penone, adding that thinking about time and the human condition is central to his work. Long before everyone talked about it, sustainability had been at the heart of his artistic practice. He uses fallen trees sourced from his 50-acre property near Turin and through a network of local tradespeople who clear debris to keep forests clean and mitigate fire risk. Harvesting cork is eco-friendly; the bark grows back. “It’s always been a problem for man to understand time,” says Penone. “But it’s possible to go back in the life of a tree, because it’s a living being.”

Born in 1947, Penone moved from the village of Garessio, Italy to attend the Accademia Albertina of Fine Arts in Turin, where he found students repeating forms from the past rather than creating pieces “driven from necessity,” he says. “So, I tried to do work that was related to what I knew better. That was nature. It was wood. It was trees, and that had resonance in the context of a strong group of Torino artists.” In fact, he became the youngest member of that radical, late 1960s collective—the Arte Povera movement—celebrated for raw, conceptual art made from “poor” materials like twigs, burlap, newspapers, and dirt. Remarkably, by 22, Penone made the artistic discovery of his lifetime, creating his first Albero (“Tree”) sculpture. “I found inside of a beam, the form of the tree that produced it,” he recalls. “Carving the wood, I followed one year of growth of the tree, removing the growth rings to reveal the sapling inside of the wood.” Delicately chiseling and scraping timber, layer by layer—a process that he follows to this day—reveals the relentless flow of time. In museums, the pieces look like post-apocalyptic archeology, a young tree trapped inside an ancient one.

Penone is equally famous for outdoor interventions that appear hyperreal and futuristic. In 2013, he placed a trio of thirty-three-foot-tall sculptures (cast from elm, cherry, and nettle trees,) around New York’s Madison Square Park, with river boulders weighing thousands of pounds nestled in their trunks and branches. “Crowds gathered at the perimeter to watch the artist and riggers,” says Brooke Kamin Rapaport, former artistic director and Martin Friedman chief curator of the Madison Square Park Conservancy. She describes the piece as “balletic choreography,” and notes that the precariously mounted boulders symbolize the risky consequence of human interference with the natural world.

Back at Gagosian, the artist—again referencing the cycle of time—begins his exhibition with an ancient metal artifact. Near the gallery’s entrance, Penone and Weinberg have included a polished Egyptian bronze mirror c. 1539-1478 BCE (on loan from the Brooklyn Museum). A row of Penone’s encrusted bronze panels, Riflesso del Bronzo (The Reflection of Bronze) serves as an endpoint in the final room. “Bronze itself is interesting because it’s close to a vegetal,” says Penone, whose mind never strays from the arboreal roots of his practice. “If you leave it outside, the oxidation of the bronze becomes green, but if you have oxidation, it looks very close to the bark of a tree.”