Giuseppe Penone's sculptures on display in Cuneo thanks to Fondazione CRC and Rivoli Castle

At the Monumental Complex of San Francesco in Cuneo, the exhibition Giuseppe Penone: Incidences of the Void will be held from Oct. 12, 2019 to Feb. 2, 2020, a collaboration between Fondazione CRC and Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea and curated by the director of Castello di Rivoli, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev with Giulia Colletti.

The public will be able to admire a number of works by the artist originally from Garessio, among the world’s most important contemporary sculptors. Intent of the exhibition is to lead to a reflection on the duality between emptiness and fullness as constituent parts of his production in a game of cross-references. The artist has dedicated himself since the late 1960s toArte Povera, where nature and culture are intrinsically linked.

“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 organisms and their transformations. Penone perceives the world and life in a sculptural way, touching and caressing its constituent parts. Even the act of breathing is a form of automatic sculpture, produced without realizing it. Sculpture is about carving, excavating and producing voids or, conversely, it is about casting, duplicating and multiplying, through a series of steps, from positive to negative, the form being duplicated or copied. Both addition and subtraction occur through gestures of encounter and, therefore, through relations of intention between the human and the material, between the human and the nonhuman,” said explains Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev.

Among the works in the exhibition is Matrix, a sculpture that will cross the nave of St. Francis Church. It is a fir tree that the artist has dissected longitudinally into two parts, excavated the layers of wood following concentric rings and disclosed the essence of the plant, obtaining the negative of the tree at a precise moment of its existence. Penone with this work establishes a relationship between human and plant, as the fir tree has anthropomorphic sinuosities and its length is similar to the height of an adult human being (about 170 centimeters).

Other sculptures featured will be Suture, a work that resembles the structure of the human skull, which will be in dialogue with the architecture of the church apse; Daphne, in which the human imprint is visible in the outer bark while in the inner bark the sculpture reproduces the grain of the laurel wood that was used as a model. The latter is in direct relation to Matrix.

In the series Vegetable Gestures, Penone proposes a reflection on the relationship between human and vegetable beings and their respective ability to modify each other’s identity through real or potential forms of interaction. The artist covered some mannequins with clay, on which he produced grooves with his fingers; in the latter he poured wax and from the wax bronze, thus obtaining a partial envelope of the form of these bodies, inside or outside of which vegetables can be allowed to grow.

Finally, the model of Identity, among the sculptor’s most recent works, with studies and preparatory drawings, and the sculpture itself will be on view: a bronze tree, on which the artist has grafted an albino aluminum copy that, upside down, seems to dematerialize the plant’s wooden physicality.

“The exhibition is the result of the great work put in place by Fondazione CRC in recent years, thanks also to the collaboration with first-rate cultural institutions such as Castello di Rivoli: Penone’s availability demonstrates the importance and goodness of this unique exhibition project. Once again this year, Fondazione CRC succeeds in offering the Cuneo community and the many art lovers who will come specifically to Cuneo the opportunity to admire with their own eyes an exhibition of the highest level,” commented Fondazione CRC President Giandomenico Genta.

For info: www.fondazionecrc.it and www.castellodirivoli.org

Hours: Tuesday through Saturday from 3:30 to 6:30 p.m.; Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.
Free admission.

Pictured is a detail of the sculpture Matrix.

Giuseppe Penone's sculptures on display in Cuneo thanks to Fondazione CRC and Rivoli Castle

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