River of Forms: Giuseppe Penone’s Drawings

One of the most influential figures in the international artistic landscape since the late 1960s, Giuseppe Penone was born in the village of Garessio in the northern region of Piedmont, Italy. Although Penone currently lives and works in Turin, his country upbringing greatly influenced his work, which ranges from pioneering actions and sculpture to photography and works on paper. His groundbreaking early performances and sculptures of the 1960s–70s were conceived as interventions that placed his body in close contact with nature, particularly trees, stones, and water. Penone was the youngest member of Arte Povera, a heterogenous group of Italian artists brought together at the end of the 1960s by their interest in connecting art and life. Penone’s emphasis on the use of his body in his work and his interest in nature aligns him with other international artistic movements such as Process Art and Land Art. Penone’s work is held in prominent public collections at MoMA in New York, Tate in London, Nationalgalerie in Berlin, MAXXI in Rome, and Centre Pompidou in Paris, which organized a retrospective exhibition of his work in 2004. A selection of his works on paper have been previously exhibited at the Drawing Center, New York, in 2004, and the Musée de la Ville de Strasbourg, France, in 1991. Major exhibitions such as Penone: L’Espace de la main (Musée de la Ville de Strasbourg, 1991), Giuseppe Penone (Kunstmuseum, Winterthur, 2013), and Giuseppe Penone. A Tree in the Wood (Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, 2018–19) included several of the works in the proposed gift.