Giuseppe Penone: Circling, Gagosian Gallery (Britannia Street)

Giuseppe Penone is bet known for forging his artistic identity in the Arte Povera movement. Literally meaning 'poor art,' Arte Povera emerged in the 1960's, led by a group of anti-establishment Italian artists. As a movement it rejected traditional standards of beauty and value, valorising the body, nature and experience over inherited aesthetic conventions or expensive materials. Their work often incorporated everyday objects, language, movement and natural processes.

Penone began working with one of his most sustained subjects, the tree, at the age of 21. He started stunting the growth of trees in a forest near to where he was born using nails, wire and a metal cast of his hand. Penone's works are interventions in natural processes that maintain a relationship to the raw material in the finished work. The wood or stone is not simply used by the artist to represent something else, such as a human figure, instead the natural qualities of the material itself are represented in the artworks. 

The works on display in Circling at the Gagosian, Sigillo (Seal), and Scrigno (Casket), are two of Penone's most monumental and ambitious works to date. Sigillo transforms the way that we see marble, a traditional sculptor's material, by emphasising the subtle colours and patterns that have been created by a geological process lasting thousands of years. Scrigno is a large work composed of pieces of leather that have been wrapped around a tree while wet so that they have retained the impression of the tree's bark. The rough, dark surface of the leather so resembles a tree's bark that it looks as though it has been unwrapped from the tree and flattened onto the wall. In contrast to this, a hollow bronze cast of a long, delicate tree branch cut in half carrying sticky resin inside, is attached to the wall at hand level. This is a really excellent opportunity to see these captivating and mysterious works by one of Italy's leading artists. Even if you were fortunate enough to see Penone's Bloomberg Comission at the Whitechapel, this new show at the Gagosian really offers something new with a focus that broadens our view of his practice.