GIUSEPPE PENONE. ALBERI IN VERSI

For Giuseppe Penone (Garessio 1947), the tree is the image of his youth spent in the woods of the Maritime Alps, and has therefore become a frequent presence in his more than fifty years of research. Through its growth in concentric circles, the tree reveals an essential form, strictly necessary to its very existence and development: it is firmly rooted in the earth but with branches reaching up towards the sky. Of all trees, the artist prefers conifers, because of their twist-resistant trunks and their regularly spaced branches: in effect, a formal synthesis of the very idea of a tree. For these reasons, the work Penone has chosen to place in Piazza della Signoria in Florence is a monumental fir tree. Its trunk and branches are made of cast stainless steel, encircled by a lattice that lends an ascending sense to the installation: the eighteen elements that compose it have been modelled in bronze, using a process of casting from bamboo moulds. Abete (Fir), which anticipated the opening of the exhibition at the Uffizi Galleries by a few months, reveals Penone’s interest in the environmental aspects of art, especially in the urban space where, according to the artist, continuity between culture and nature, between the time of history and that of life, between past and present, takes place. The exhibition is part of the Dante celebrations planned for 2021. The title itself alludes to Dante’s theme of the “tree, whose life is from its top.”

Edited by: Gianfranco Maraniello, Carlo Ossola, Renata Pintus