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Giuseppe Penone

b. 1947 · Italian

CONFIDENTIAL MARKET
—Auction record
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Biography

Giuseppe Penone was born on 3 April 1947 in Garessio, Piedmont, Italy, and lives and works between Turin and Paris. Emerging in the late 1960s as one of the central figures of Arte Povera, he has spent more than five decades developing a body of work that treats sculpture as a record of transformation — a sustained inquiry into the relationships between the human body, vegetal life, time, and material process. His earliest major works, gathered under the title Alpi Marittime (1968), established the terms of this investigation through actions involving trees, metal, wire, and other natural and industrial materials, positioning bodily gesture and organic growth as co-authors of form. From that foundation he developed Ripetere il bosco (1969 onward), a series of carved wooden beams in which industrial timber is worked back to reveal the younger tree once contained within it — an act that collapses the distance between natural history and artistic labour, and that has been presented in major institutional contexts including the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea. The same logic of concealment and recovery animates Cedro di Versailles (2004), a site installation carved from a cedar trunk uprooted during the 1999 storm at Versailles, and the ongoing series gathered as The Hidden Life Within, in which each carved trunk offers what might be called the clearest single statement of his challenge to the boundary between natural object and artistic form. Penone's vocabulary extends well beyond wood: Soffi (1977–present) renders respiration itself as sculptural and photographic event; Disegno d'acqua (2003–2007), a permanent installation at the Reggia di Venaria Reale in Turin, deploys black granite, green marble, blue granite, water, and timed air flux so that natural forces generate an ongoing drawing; and Biforcazione (1987–1992), a monumental bronze held by the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris, demonstrates his capacity to expand from intimate bodily actions to architectural scale.

Penone is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris and New York, Gagosian in London and Paris, Konrad Fischer Galerie in Düsseldorf and Berlin, and Tucci Russo Studio per l'Arte Contemporanea in Torre Pellice. His work entered public collections across Europe, North America, and beyond at an early stage, and today it is held by institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Centre Pompidou–Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris, Tate Britain in London, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pinault Collection at Palazzo Grassi, the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller in Otterlo, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Louvre Abu Dhabi, and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, among many others. Solo exhibitions have been presented at the Galleria Borghese in Rome, the Centre Pompidou, the Whitechapel Gallery, the Serpentine Galleries, and the Italian Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale, where he showed Sculture di linfa in 2007. In 2023 he was elected Foreign Associate Member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and he is a recipient of the Praemium Imperiale awarded by the Japan Art Association. The most comprehensive presentation of his work in the United Kingdom to date, Thoughts in the Roots — a survey of more than one hundred works spanning the 1960s to the present, curated by Claude Adjil and Hans Ulrich Obrist — opened at Serpentine South, London, in April 2025.

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