Giuseppe Penone is an Italian artist. Born in April 1947, he is now 78 years old.
Penone was a leading figure in the Arte Povera movement which arose in Italy in the 1960s. ‘Arte Povera’ simply means ‘poor art, and was a reaction of sorts against the flashy American consumerist Pop Art of the 1960s.
Arte Povera rejected high finish, glossy, fashion-related artefacts in favour of really simple materials and objects encountered in everyday life, especially the relics of industrial processes or building works – bricks, slates, tiles, offcuts of fabric, leftovers from metal castings, that kind of thing.
Penone was born near Cuneo in Northern Italy, a region of densely forested and mountainous landscapes and his entire career reflects this. He makes landscape art, environmental art, with a particular focus on trees. As he writes:
‘Every word for trees collects days of rain, sun and mist. It contains seasons, memories of places and time; it has a different meaning from person to person. These words fill the woods with their presence, invade the landscape and guide our care for nature.’
‘Thoughts In The Roots’
‘Thoughts In The Roots’ is an exhibition at the Serpentine South gallery in Hyde Park, that brings together 20 or so large-scale works by Penone – sculptures, installations and drawings – that range from 1969 to the present day. His large scale sculptural works include materials like wood, leaves, resin, bronze, and marble to explore the interface between nature and the human world.
Works
With Eyes Closed (2009)
When you walk in through the entrance the first thing you see is a long, wide, white canvas with thousands of black objects stuck onto it.
A occhi chiusi (With Eyes Closed) by Giuseppe Penone (2009) at Serpentine South (photo by the author)
This is A occhi chiusi (With Eyes Closed). When you go up close you discover the image is created from acacia thorns carefully arranged to create what, from a distance, looks like a pair of eyes. There’s a long story about this in the exhibition guide which involves fancy metaphors about sight, vision, art and so on, but what struck me is how prickly this surface is. How rebarbative. I have roses in my garden and fairly regularly get scratched when pruning or dead-heading. So for me I had an entirely physical response to the work, one of aversion and alarm.
Close-up of A occhi chiusi (With Eyes Closed) by Giuseppe Penone (2009) at Serpentine South (photo by the author)
Space of Light (2025)
In front of it you’ll have noticed the sawn-off segment of trunk. The inside of the trunk is filled with what appears to be wax, itself embedded with shards of wood. This is one example of the series titled ‘Spazio di luce’ or ‘Space of Light’ and, created in 2025, appears to have been made just for this show and this position.
Presumably Penone and the curators knew that when they positioned it in front of the huge image of a pair of eyes it would like a squat brown nose and create a face.
To Breathe the Shadow (2000)
The big central room in the gallery contains Respirare l’ombra (To Breathe the Shadow) (2000). Here all four walls of this big space are covered in squares of wire mesh which are holding back against the wall thousands and thousands of dried laurel leaves. These leaves exude quite a strong smell so it’s a little like entering a vast aromatic green vivarium. That’s the first work. On facing walls are positioned two additional works.
Book trees (2017)
On the wall by the doors is Alberi libro (Book Trees). This is a flat display of light brown raw wood which he has created by carving away the outer rings of mature timber layer by layer. This process reveals the knots left by branches so the resulting trunks are skinny but spiky. The differing timbre of the wood reflects the different trees used, namely white fir, cedar and larch wood.
‘Book Trees (2017) (the wooden sculpture) set against ‘To Breathe the Shadow’ (the walls of dried laurel leaves) (2000) by Giuseppe Penone at Serpentine South (photo by the author)
On the opposite wall is what I initially took to be something like the head of a stag with big complicated antlers, admittedly coming out top and bottom instead of alongside each other. In fact this installation represents the cast of a human lung which is sprouting a bronze branch with leaves, above, and a gold cast of a branch with leaves below. I felt there must be some symbolism around the use of a golden bough to enter hell in Virgil’s poem The Aeneid, but apparently not. Instead the lung is attached to a wall of leaves and so symbolises the act of breathing on oxygen produced by trees and plants, which is fundamental to all our lives.
The lung cast part of ‘To Breathe the Shadow’ (the walls of dried laurel leaves) by Giuseppe Penone at Serpentine South (photo by the author)
Breath of Leaves
In one of the side galleries is Soffio di foglie (Breath of Leaves), on the right in the photo below. It’s a pile of dry boxwood leaves which the artist lay on, and breathed into. The leaves therefore ‘record the imprint of his body and breath’ although, to the casual passerby, they might just look like a pile of leaves. The gallery wasn’t that busy and I felt the usual anarchist impulse to actually interact with a work of modern art, to throw myself onto the pile, wriggle around, then leap up and walk away looking innocent before a visitor assistant could spot me. But I managed to suppress the impulse.
Installation view of ‘Thoughts in the Roots’ by Giuseppe Penone at Serpentine South, showing ‘Pressure’ hanging on the wall, left, and ‘Breath of Leaves’ on the flow (photo by the author)
Pressure
On the left in the photo above is Pressione (Pressure), a large-scale graphite imprint created on-site by Penone which spans not just the wall you can see, but another off to its left i.e. it’s very big. This derives from a technique he developed in the 1970s and what he’s done is captured imprints of his skin by pressing ink- and charcoal-covered adhesive tape onto his body. This method preserves the fine lines and creases of his skin in almost photographic detail. Then the imprints are enlarged, projected onto the gallery walls, and meticulously traced by hand in graphite.
It’s titled ‘Pressure’ because the resulting charcoal drawing reveals not only the intricate typography of the artist’s skin but also the varying pressures exerted in different places. If you go right up close to it and focus on any particular section, it bears an uncanny resemblance to a kind of abstract Chinese calligraphy.
Close-up of ‘Pressure’ in ‘Thoughts in the Roots’ by Giuseppe Penone at Serpentine South (photo by the author)
Forest Green (1986)
In the other long gallery are a further two works on the wall and an installation. Here’s one of the wall works, Verde del bosco (Forest Green) from 1986. This is a loose fabric hanging onto which Penone has imprinted the surfaces of tree bark, branches and leaves through the process of frottage or rubbings, not a million miles away from brass rubbing. Opposite it hangs a similarly sized work, made in the same way but from 30 years later, in 2017, whose reddish browns convey autumn and age in contrast to the vibrant spring green of the earlier piece.
Installation view of ‘Thoughts in the Roots’ by Giuseppe Penone at Serpentine South, showing ‘Forest Green’ (photo by the author)
Vegetal Gestures
Sharing a room with the two forest prints is Gesti vegetali (Vegetal Gestures). This is a series of highly schematic black metal sculptures of human figures, shown in the process of embracing small trees growing out of terracotta plant pots. To be blunt, these weren’t very impressive.
Installation view of ‘Thoughts in the Roots’ by Giuseppe Penone at Serpentine South, showing ‘Vegetal Gestures’ in the foreground, with ‘Forest green’ on the wall, left, and ‘Forest Green – Summer’, on the wall, right (photo by the author)
Outside
Penone extends the exhibition beyond the gallery walls into the surrounding landscape of Kensington Park. Three life-size bronze trees stand among their real world counterparts.
In my photo you can see how the nearest one, Albero folgorato (Thunderstruck Tree), is cast is brilliantly laced with gold leaf. It’s based on a hundred-year-old willow tree that grew in Grand-Hornu, Belgium. After being struck by lightning its trunk split at the centre, laying bare the internal material of the wood. Penone cast the tree in bronze and lined its pulp with gold leaf. The idea was to ‘capture the invisible force of nature that sculpted its splintered shape and complex internal structure.’ Maybe. What it actually comes over as is a spectacular work of installation art.
Tree casts: ‘Thunderstruck Tree’ in the foreground with the two ‘Ideas of Stone’ in the background (photo by the author)
Beyond ‘Thunderstruck’ you can see in the background two more ‘trees’ notable for the big grey boulders which have been wedged among their branches. I can imagine that was a health and safety nightmare. Penone comments:
‘An idea that is formed summing up innumerable previous thoughts, polished by the passage of time, compacted by the weight of memories, cracked by doubts and by the uncertainties that situate themselves between the thoughts separating them. It is a river stone that appears amid the branches of a tree.’
Around the base of the two trees are a dozen or so boulders which turn out be very handy to have a sit-down and a rest, especially for mums with small children who I saw playing and running round between them.
Thoughts
I like Arte Povera and I like landscape art and I am a keen gardener and have planted half a dozen young trees in my garden and dug up a few in my time, the wife taught natural science at school and we took the kids on massive walks when they were small and pointed out species of trees and plants and birds and insects, and a friend is a rewilding consultant, and my son did a biology degree, so I exist in an atmosphere drenched in knowledge and concern for the natural world, and plants and trees in particular, and so I should have loved this exhibition and yet… I didn’t.
Actual nature is dirty and messy. The soil and everything living in and growing out of it, water in its millions of forms and permutations, even the air we breathe, let alone our own bodies, teem and pullulate with life, with bacteria and viruses and organisms all struggling to survive and replicate in a world of unending and brutal competition.
None of that is here. These works are sterile and antiseptic, qualities brought out all the more by the sterile and antiseptic environs of the Serpentine gallery. It’s an art gallery not a nature trail and everything in it is beautifully curated, and arranged just so, with white lines on the floor stating just how close you can get to any of the works and no closer. And woe betide anyone who dares to actually touch or interact with any of these exhibits! This carefully curated and strictly policed environment is about as far from the teeming anarchy of the natural world as you can get.
So all the rhetoric in the exhibition guide, and the poetic quotes from Signor Penone, about the interaction between humans and nature, between trees and man, between organic and inorganic, cut no ice with me. Art is the opposite of nature and nowhere is the contradiction laid more bare than in an exhibition which claims so emphatically to be about nature and natural processes. In the end all it did for me was foreground the very unnatural processes by which Penone constructed all these static, dead, lifeless works.
The boulders in the trees were funny. But the nicest part of the morning was walking away from the gallery altogether and into the long grassy parts of Kensington Gardens and finding some genuine fallen logs to sit and have lunch on, watching the insects in the grass and the birds overhead.
Related links
- Giuseppe Penone: Thoughts In The Roots continues at Serpentine South until 7 September 2025
Books & Boots 