Giuseppe Penone is a key figure in radical Italian Arte Povera, known for making sculpture that links human perception to the natural world. His practice often begins with a long look at trees—growth, knots, rings, and the physical evidence of time in wood—and then translates those observations into durable sculptural forms.
Working across materials such as wood, bronze, stone, and other elements, Penone creates works that treat form as something revealed rather than invented. He repeatedly stages the idea of tracing: exposing structures inside matter, maintaining continuity between a living process and its transformed record, and using juxtaposition to underline transformation rather than replacement.
In The Reflection of Bronze, Penone extends this logic into bronze sculptures that remain tied to the regenerative logic of bark, the anatomy of growth, and myth as a way of returning the body to natural cycles—turning “permanence” into an ongoing record of change.
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