Giuseppe Penone: Arboreal Interventions

As a part of the exhibition A Celebration: Acquisitions in Honor of the Morgan’s Centennial, on view through August 17, this selection highlights a group of drawings gifted to the museum by the artist Giuseppe Penone. Though Penone is best known as a sculptor of the Arte Povera movement, which emerged in Italy in the late 1960s, drawing has always been at the core of his practice. Like many of his Arte Povera peers, he was and remains deeply interested in the relationship between humans and nature. These drawings explore the range of Penone’s production on paper, much of which connects to his sculptures or performances. Project for Work on Trees (1968) pertains to interventions Penone made in the life cycle of trees: for example, wrapping a tree in wire and sticking a wooden stake into it to interfere with its growth. Untitled, also from 1968, is based on works in which the artist carved a tree form out of a wooden block, an effort to symbolically restore them to their natural state and reverse industry’s impact. Made more than thirty years later, in 2001, Between Bark and Bark presages a 2003 sculpture executed on the grounds of Versailles, where Penone encased a living tree within a bronze cast from a dying tree, giving it new life.