Giuseppe Penone

Born in 1947 in Garessio, a small rural town in Piedmont, Italy, Giuseppe Penone studied sculpture at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Turin.
At the age of 21, he produced a series of actions in which he intervened in the growth process of a young tree. This inaugural work was noticed by the critic Germano Celant, who associated the young artist with the Arte Povera movement, which advocated an art that was free of traditional practices and materials in order to privilege the creative process over the finished object. Giuseppe Penone was interested very early on in the possibilities of bronze as well as in body imprints as memory and matrix of the work. His work, rooted in the idea of an interdependence between nature and culture, combines formal explorations of natural materials (wood, bronze, marble, stone, acacia thorns…) and fragments or imprints of bodies. Celebrated throughout the world, winner of the prestigious Praemium Imperiale, the artist represented Italy at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and was the subject, in France, of a retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 2004 followed by an exhibition of his monumental sculptures at the Château de Versailles in 2013.