Giuseppe Penone: The Reflection of Bronze

Gagosian is pleased to announce The Reflection of Bronze, an exhibition of new bronze sculptures by Giuseppe Penone, opening at 555 West 24th Street on April 22. This is the artist's first exhibition with the gallery in New York and marks the debut of two major bodies of work. Curated by Adam D. Weinberg, director emeritus of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, it is rooted in Penone's late-1960s exploration of trees, which led to his celebrated carved tree works and now culminates in sculptures that render the same subject permanent in metal. Throughout his career, Penone, a protagonist of radical Italian movement Arte Povera, has used a range of materials and forms to explore connections between human life and the natural world at large. In The Reflection of Bronze, he employs the titular alloy to trace the passage of time and the perpetuity of change. As noted by Weinberg in his essay on the exhibition, "Bronze for [Penone] is not a more permanent, more marketable substitute. . . . Rather, his use of bronze involves a profound, rich, varied, and lifelong response to enduring artistic questions." Historically used in weapons manufacture, bronze was sidelined as an artistic material following the Second World War, but regained currency in part through Penone's new approach to its use. The works on view in New York also derive from his early realization that, by excising the rings surrounding the knots in a wood beam, he could reveal the form of a tree at an earlier stage of its life. The Reflection of Bronze is structured as a three-room sequence. The first space is lined floor-to-ceiling in sheets of cork—the renewable bark of the cork oak tree—to create an enveloping environment paired with bronze elements, alluding to the regenerative capacity of skin. In the center of the room stands Marsia (Marsyas) (2024), a sculpture inspired by the Greek myth of Marsyas, the satyr who lost a musical contest to Apollo and was condemned to be flayed alive hanging from a tree. Penone refers to the story—imaged famously by Titian—in two connected bronze branches, one with bark and one bare, which evoke Marsyas's skinned and inverted figure.