Giuseppe Penone's trees in verse are on display at the Uffizi.

From July 6 to October 3, 2021, the Uffizi in Florence is hosting the exhibition Alberi in versi, a solo show by Giuseppe Penone, one of the most important living Italian artists. The exhibition is inspired by the plant symbolism of a famous verse from Paradise in the Divine Comedy. The “tree that lives by the top” (Divine Comedy, Paradise, 18: 28-30) is in fact the guiding metaphor of Trees in Verse. More than thirty works, including sculptures, installations, drawings and engravings, arrive in the museum, scattered along the Gallery’s itinerary, which are also a tribute to the Supreme Poet on the seven hundredth anniversary of his death, and trace the central themes of the artist’s work.

An essential and necessary form, the tree has always been for Penone the archetype of sculpture and at the same time living matter, similar to that of the human body. At the same time, the artist has chosen plants as the common denominator of an investigation into the ambivalent relationship between inside-outside, positive-negative, human-vegetal, art-nature. Also closely related to the principle of “inverse” are the techniques used by the artist, the cast and the impression: these processes in fact imply contact, thanks to which different bodies and materials exchange form and substance, in a continuity without hierarchies between human and non-human.

The exhibition itinerary, chosen by the artist himself, begins with works from the late 1960s. In Continuerà a crescere tranne che in quel punto (1968-1978) the theme of the human-nature relationship and the concept of time declared in sculpture through figurative devices is already present. A paradigmatic example of the inverse, the mirror, is at the center of Reversing One’s Eyes (1970), where the visible stops at the threshold of the artist’s gaze, reflected on his eyes rendered temporarily blind by mirrored lenses. Penone gives drawing the language of sculpture: its constituent elements are in fact pressure, matter, change, as also happens in the 15-meter frottage People and Years (2020), exhibited here for the first time. The ’writing of the forest’ (i.e., the imprint of a large tree made by rubbing leaves on a linen cloth resting on the trunk) is counterpointed by a text by the artist himself, almost a long poem “in verse.”

The skin, too, is an organ of contact par excellence; it is the space where the most democratic of images are generated in the form of imprints, which everyone produces and which lead man back to matter and nature, such as those transformed into sensory maps whose nerve points spill out toward the viewer in the large Acacia Thorns (2006-2014). Again, the theme of the epidermis offers an opportunity to put Penone’s work in dialogue with two statues from Roman antiquity that stand at the beginning of the Uffizi’s Ponente Corridor, each depicting flayed Marsyas: deprived of its skin, the body loses all boundaries, while the skin emptied of the body becomes virtual space. Next to them the artist wanted to place Thoughts of Leaves (2014) where, with an allusion to the similarity between human beings and the plant world, an anthropomorphic image is covered by a garment of leaves that wraps it like a mantle. Also clothed in mythological garb is the large bronze sculpture titled Artemis (2019): a double cast of a tree that shows together the inside and the outside, the empty and the full, with breast-like protuberances, as in the Artemis of Ephesus, to which the title actually refers. With the installation Breathing the Shadow (2000) Penone narrates the space that through breath fills and shapes our bodies and that is the object of a continuous exchange with the external environment. Indeed, to the complementarity between plant photosynthesis and human respiration refers the lung of leaves in gilded bronze placed between the cages lining the walls, at a height equal to that of the human lung. Another poetic metaphor can be recognized in Soffio di foglie (1979) where the negative of the body imprint and the trace left by the artist’s breath on a pile of boxwood leaves is echoed, in the center of the room, by the positive of the body of the Hermaphrodite lying supine on a cushion, a symbol of the co-presence of opposites.

The exhibition also addresses the city and outside the museum, in Piazza Signoria, with Abete, a monumental steel and bronze installation of more than 22 meters, inaugurated as a foretaste of the exhibition itself last March 25, on the occasion of Dantedì.

“Penone’s art,” comments Uffizi director Eike Schmidt, “invites a philosophical reflection on the nature of Time. The artist’s works evoke the long and slow growth processes of trees and the plant world, and pars pro-toto are configured as an intervention and a creative trace of humanity in the environment that surrounds us.”

“Reverse trees are the vital flows,” says Giuseppe Penone. “They raise the vegetables of the world that twist in the air attracted by light, they are the whirlwinds of water and matter that precipitates toward the center of the earth, they are present in the spirals of the columns of Santa Maria del Fiore, they are the thoughts that form the memory of our experience, roots that nourish our bodies.”

Giuseppe Penone was born in Garessio, near Cuneo, in 1947; he lives and works in Turin. In 1968 he began exhibiting and joined theArte Povera group of artists. In his sculptures and installations the process of making is an integral part of the work: it is the actions performed by the artist in dialectical relationship with the natural ones that give shape to a material, each time different, revealing its fantastic aspects. In 2007 he represented Italy at the 52nd Venice Biennale; in 2013 he exhibited in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles and in 2014 in the Boboli Gardens (Florence) and Madison Square Park (New York); he has solo exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and the Kunstmuseum in Winterthur (2013), at the Musée de Grenoble (2014), the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and the Musée Cantonal des Beaux Arts in Lausanne (2015), MART in Rovereto and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (2016), the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana in Rome (2017), and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in Wakefield (2019).

Giuseppe Penone's trees in verse are on display at the Uffizi.

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