‘Every word for trees collects days of rain, sun and mist. It contains seasons, memories or places and time’, says the Italian artist Giuseppe Penone, echoing the American poet Walt Whitman’s words in his masterwork, Leaves of Grass, ‘ I am large, I contain multitudes.’ This show brings together Penone’s sculptures, installations and drawings from 1969 until now. A leading figure in the Arte Povera movement – named such by the art critic Germano Celant to describe the use of ‘poor’, everyday non-art materials – he uses mostly natural resources – leaves, resin, wood, marble and bronze. In this time of globalisation and high tech, when we are further and further removed from the natural world, his quiet, meditative work could not be more relevant. Born in 1947, he grew up in a village near Cuneo, Northern Italy, a mountainous and forested region that’s shaped his lifelong exploration of the relationship between humans and nature.
It was a beautiful spring day, the sky wide and periwinkle blue, as I walked across Hyde Park to the Serpentine Gallery. In front of the pavilion stood Albero folgorato (Thunderstruck Tree), a sculpture based on a hundred-year-old willow that once grew in Grand-Hornu, Belgium. At first, I thought it was an actual tree split down the middle from a bolt of lightning, but Guiseppe Penone has cast it in bronze, lining its revealed and vulnerable interior with gold leaf. It is stunningly simple and beautiful, particularly as I saw it framed against the blue sky. Here, damage has been transformed and made whole through being made into art. The effect is similar to Kintsugi, that centuries-old technique used to mend broken Japanese pots with gold, which emphasises the beauty of imperfection and teaches us that nothing is ever truly broken, that beauty is to be found in life’s scars.
Nearby, two other ‘trees’ are filled with finely balanced river boulders of varying sizes, held in the forks between branches. Idee di pietra (idea of stones), explores the relationship between river stones and human thought, implying that both are changed and polished by the passage of time, compacted by the weight of memory. Doubts and uncertainties, Penone implies, insinuate themselves like these river stones between both thought and branches.
Using imprints of human skin and bark, he investigates our (inter)connections with the natural world. In A occhi Chuisi (With Eyes Closed) sharply protruding acacia thorns protrude from the wall to suggest a blindness to the natural world, as well as a moving inwards to create a ‘space for the imagination’ or, as the philosopher Gaston Bachelard said, ‘a space for daydreaming’.
Even breathing becomes a creative act. In Respirare l’ambra (To Breathe the Shadow), where laurel leaves are held in a (modernist?) grid of mesh, he likens breathing to the lost-wax casting process, where molten metal fills the mould whilst wax is expelled from reeds. The lingering scent of the laurels is similar to an exhale of breath, underlining the delicate balance between us and the natural world. While the centrally mounted gold-cast of a lung with its bronchi of protruding branches has the presence of an icon, a crucifix perhaps, and even some sort of pagan Greenman. Perhaps Penone is suggesting that only when we return to value nature and place it centrally will we begin to heal.
In Sofio di folie (Breath of Leaves), the work is barely there; no more than a pile of boxwood leaves in the middle of the gallery floor that carries the imprint of his prone body and breath. These have formed valleys and mountains to create a self-contained world, an island, suggesting an alternative reality to the harshly commodified one in which we actually live. Long a metaphor for Utopian space, the island is a symbol for a ‘brave new world’ as Miranda’s words declare of Prospero’s Island in The Tempest. A space where we can begin anew, and undergo spiritual transformation.
Penone has carved away the outer rings of mature timber layer by layer to expose the knots left by branches, to show us the tree before it was felled. On the back wall of the central gallery Alberi Libro (Book Trees) made of white fir, cedar and larch, consists of twelve upstanding saplings rowed side by side that bear an uncanny resemblance to the human spine. Trees carry within them the story of their own histories. To quote the bard again, we ‘find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones…..’
A large-scale, site-specific work spans two walls of the gallery, exploring in Presione (Pressure) how humanity leaves its imprint on the natural world. Extending ideas from his 1970 work, Svolgere la propria pelle (To Unroll One’s Skin) – where he pressed inked and charcoal-covered adhesive tape onto his body to capture the fine lines and creases in his skin in photographic detail – Penone has, here, projected and traced these enlarged imprints on the walls. The result can be read almost as a map, full of tracks and byways that suggest a journey of reflection into the essential self. This beautiful image of ‘unrolling one’s skin’ extends beyond the human body to the natural world. The lush forests and vegetation depicted in Verde del bosco (Green Forest) are the result of imprinting the surfaces of tree bark, branches and leaves. Wrapping natural cotton fibre around the trunks of living trees Penone creates frottage rubbings using the natural pigmentation – the vibrant green and the reddish brown reflect spring and autumn, the changing of the seasons.
Never intrusive, this work is quietly beautiful, like the breath of a living forest. The virgin world is a miraculous place. It has provided cultures since the dawn of time – as with the most ancient cave paintings – all we need to make art. There is no need for noise or clamour. Postmodernism has spent too long elevating the commodity and the secular to the level of the ersatz ‘sacred’. It has taken us to the edge of disaster. Yet, if only we would stop, Penone seems to be saying, look and listen to the world around us, we might find – as in the fissures of a thunderstruck tree – a space for contemplation and reflection that returns us to ourselves.
Giuseppe Penone: Thoughts In The Roots, Serpentine South Gallery and Kensington Gardens, 3 April – 7 September 2025
Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist and freelance art critic. She has published five collections of poetry, a book of short stories and four novels, which have been translated into French and Mandarin.
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