Giuseppe Penone's big donation to Rivoli Castle: 219 works and objects at the museum

Castello di Rivoli has announced a major donation by Giuseppe Penone (Garessio, 1947), one of Italy’s leading living artists: 219 works on paper and archival materials arrive at the Piedmontese museum, as well as the work Svolgere la propria pelle - finestra (1970-2019), a version of the important work set up by the artist of the same name in 1972 for Documenta 5 in Kassel. The donated works represent a fundamental opportunity to deepen Penone’s artistic practice and will be kept at the CRRI (Castello di Rivoli Research Institute). The donation complements and completes those made by Penone in 2020 to the Philadelphia Museum of Art (to which 309 works on paper and 5 artist’s books were dned) and the Centre Pompidou in Paris (350 works on paper). In 2022 the three museums will hold exhibitions on Giuseppe Penone.

This is an important nucleus of works ranging from 1968 to the present, and the materials are mostly unpublished. The artist comments with some verses on the importance of donating his drawings to a museum that is in the same place where he conceives and creates his works, before they travel around the world: “The first intuition, the / first idea of a work / noted on a sheet of paper / testifies to the fluctuation / of imagination before / stiffening into form. / It is good to think of / laying down ideas in the places / where they appeared / floating.”

The donation includes materials in various media (drawings, autograph working notes, handwritten reflections and design sketches, architectural renderings, photographs made by theartist, annotated photographs, all materials documenting the creative and staging process and the presentation of individual works), which make it possible to reconstruct the genesis and unfolding of Giuseppe Penone’s thought, to trace the ideational processes of his works, to trace their construction details, and to contextualize, within his practice, the vision that oversees the staging and the scrupulousness of the final documentation and transmission. These are therefore materials of great importance: as the artist himself states, “through drawing one thinks, one associates forms, one juxtaposes materials... Drawing is born from a matter that outside the sheet is only dirt but when it is organized in a set of gestures it becomes an object that has the preciousness of thought and evocation.”

The set of papers donated to the Museum refers to all the major works of art conceived and made by Penone to be placed in the open space of the territory where he resides, works and was born, that of Piedmont. These are four points of a personal geography that becomes an artistic terrarium and a small ecosystem: the Cuneo area where Penone took the first steps of his artistic journey in 1968 by making interactions with natural elements in the woods around Garessio(Alpi Marittime, 1968); the intervention in Turin’s urban space at the Passante Ferroviario(Albero giardino, 1998); and the subsequent return to the city with the sculptural intervention in front of GAM-Torino(In limine, 2008); the large garden-work in the Lower Park of Venaria Reale(The Garden of Fluid Sculptures, 2003-2007 and the subsequent Anaphora, 2016, 2019) in the same place; and, finally, the arrival in Rivoli of the imposing double tree in aluminum, bronze and mirror “planted” in 2019 in front of the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea(Identity, 2017).

In addition to the works on paper, as mentioned above, Penone also donated to the Museum the work Unfolding One’s Skin - Window, 1970-2019, composed of 19 impressions of his own body photographically reproduced on film on the glass panels of the Fridericianum in Kassel in 1972, which will be permanently installed at the Manica Lunga, in the Library room facing the entrance to the CRRI. The work, made in a first version in 1970 and presented on the occasion of the Documenta 5 exhibition (1972), acquired its present form precisely at the Castello di Rivoli on the occasion of the exhibition Harald Szeemann. Museum of Obsessions / Museum of Obsessions (Feb. 26 to May 26, 2019). Also accompanying the donation is an edition of the artist’s book Rovesciare gli occhi (Einaudi, Turin, 1977).

“It means something when one of the world’s greatest artists decides to donate an exceptional body of work to three major public museums,” says Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Director of the Castello di Rivoli. “It is an endowment and an act of faith in the ability of public institutions to withstand momentary crises and bad weather, and therefore to endure over time, a time much longer than a single lifetime. It is about passing on to posterity seeds that are one’s art, confident that they will be able to germinate in a future that is as yet unimaginable today. Castello di Rivoli is pleased to receive this gift, and grateful for the artist’s trust in the Museum. Giuseppe Penone’s art explores the fundamentals of sculpture as a way of empirically knowing and understanding the world. His art is based on the principle of embodying a physical, tactile-visual awareness of all living organisms and their transformations. Penone perceives the world and life in a sculptural way, touching and caressing its constituent parts, without ever distinguishing between nature and culture or, rather, without claiming any superiority of human beings over the rest of the natural world. It is about an encounter and, therefore, about relationships between the human and the material, the human and the nonhuman, matters of skin and touching, cognitive elements to which the donated paper drawings punctually introduce us. The gift of the work Unfolding One’s Skin, made using the original materials from the installation on windows in Kassel in 1972, is a further extraordinary gesture.”

“The materials donated by Giuseppe Penone represent a fundamental opportunity to deepen the artist’s practice,” says Andrea Viliani, Head and Curator of CRRI. “Kept at the CRRI, the Castello di Rivoli’s new research department, they will be made available to scholars from all over the world, contributing to the dissemination of knowledge about the artist, in the context of the research and poetics pertaining in various ways to Arte povera, of which the Castello di Rivoli stands as an institution of reference at the international level. Among the most important artistic movements of the 20th century, Arte povera found its origin in Piedmont, a territory from which, like Penone himself, a large group of the artists came. By reconnecting nature and culture, the artist reminds us of the importance of rooting ourselves poetically in the world in which we live. A lesson whose urgency and importance our globalized and digitized world, but also in deep crisis from an ecological point of view, is learning to recognize, on its own skin.”

Image: Giuseppe Penone © Penone Archive and Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art

Giuseppe Penone's big donation to Rivoli Castle: 219 works and objects at the museum

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