Summer exhibitions at the Uffizi: focus on Giuseppe Penone and Raphael's Leo X

Summer at the Uffizi in Florence is marked by two events, one on contemporary art and one on ancient art. The first, starting July 6, is the exhibition of Giuseppe Penone, one of Italy’s leading contemporary artists: thirty works by the Piedmontese artist will be on display in the Alberi In-Versi (Trees In-Verse) exhibition, until Oct. 3, on the second floor, in the Detti and Camino rooms, and on the second floor of the Gallery, with drawings, photographs, engravings, sculptures and installations. The exhibition is part of the Dante celebrations planned for 2021. The title itself alludes to the theme of the “tree that lives by the top” in The Divine Comedy. In the halls of the Florentine museum, it will be possible to traverse more than 50 years of Penone’s activity, with unpublished works but also preparatory drawings and canvases that characterize his vision and mark the transition between two-dimensionality and the tactile function of drawing, in a border territory between the corporeal and conceptual worlds, between matter and idea.

Giuseppe Penone, born in Garessio, near Cuneo, in 1947, 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), the 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).

The second appointment, however, is with Raphael: in fact, the exhibition Raphael and the Return of the Medici Pope - Restorations and Discoveries, dedicated to the restoration of the Portrait of Leo X between Cardinals Giulio de’ Medici and Luigi de’ Rossi, carried out by the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, has been extended until January 16, 2022. The exhibition is held in the Sala delle Nicchie of the Palatine Gallery in the Pitti Palace.

Pictured: the exhibition on Leo X

Summer exhibitions at the Uffizi: focus on Giuseppe Penone and Raphael's Leo X

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