Giuseppe Penone. Scultura
The Mart, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Rovereto in Italy, just opened a major exhibition dedicated to the work of Italian artist Giovanni Penone, one of the younger members of the Arte Povera movement. Here is a transcription of his interview as well as a few words from Mart director Gianfranco Maraniello.
The flow of the exhibition is dictated by space and is based on the idea of gesture: a simple gesture, made into matter, imprinted in matter, which is the exact principle of sculpture. In this museum, the space was completely fragmented, divided, and my works are monumental! It’s because of their size that we decided to tear down the partition walls, in order to open up and entirely reveal the space, which had never been done before.
The Mart is a museum which allows a dialogue with its surroundings. Thanks to this exhibition, we have rediscovered the possibility of using natural light from the skylights. Penone’s work explores the archaic concept of sculpture. A hand grasping a tree can sense its growth, its internal flux. But the tree keeps growing, even as the hand grasps it. Holding the moment of this gesture means coming back to the process of sculpting itself. This process – a painting progressively coming out of a canvas’s surface, a sculpture sprouting out of its pedestal – goes beyond the limits of an exhibition room. For this exhibition, the museum walls were too constraining to hold an energy which is not just relevant to the visibility of the work in a specific space, but which is also facing the landscape, the memory, and is part of a natural cycle to which humans also belong. All this shows the ultimate moment of a trajectory of art viewed as an ability to give yourself limits and to surpass them.
The Mart is presenting a major exhibition on one of sculpture’s most significant artists, a work which sets itself in space and relates directly to it. That’s why this is not only an exhaustive exhibition on one of the masters of the Arte Povera, but also an opportunity to rediscover the relationship between the work of art and architecture. It highlights the exhibitional potential of Mario Botta’s architecture and allows a reflection on the very idea of sculpture and of what possibilities it offers today. All this is brought forward through an experience which combines the artist’s know-how and nature’s growth, its trees, its produces, its minerals. The analogies between the work of art and the internal structure of the natural world are at the very center of Giuseppe Pepone’s focus. Visiting a Giuseppe Pepone’s exhibition means not only being able to observe the work of one of the world’s most extraordinary artists, but also to reflect on the possibilities of sculpture and on its analogies with nature’s way of growing and spreading.
19 March — 26 June 2016
Mart
Corso Bettini 43
38068 Rovereto (TN)
Italy
Tue – Sun 10h – 18h
Friday 10 – 21h
Closed on monday