GIUSEPPE PENONE

PARIS, September 18, 2023—Gagosian is pleased to announce Giuseppe Penone’s Impronte di luce /Empreintes de lumière. Opening on October 17 at 4 rue de Ponthieu, the exhibition centers on anentirely new body of paintings, unique in the artist’s more than fifty-year career. Inspired by Penone’sexperience of Le Corbusier’s Couvent Sainte-Marie de La Tourette in Éveux, France, these canvasesare on view alongside imprints used in their production; an artist’s book, Le Bois Sacré du Couvent deLa Tourette (2022), which collects rubbings made from the building’s wood-grained concrete walls; andother graphic and sculptural works.

Penone’s complex and extended relationship with the convent—he has visited it repeatedly andexhibited there in 2022—sparked a dialogue that led to these new paintings. Working with paint—amedium to which he is a relative stranger—and making use of Le Corbusier’s sixty-three-color palettefor ‘architectural polychromy,’ the artist has again employed a process of imprinting and tracing.First stamping sections of his hands in ink on paper to generate shapes that suggest animal or humanfigures, he then projected the designs onto canvases, reproducing them at a larger scale in oil paint.

Throughout his career, Penone, a protagonist of Arte Povera, has wielded a broad range of materialsand forms to explore growth, respiration, and other involuntary processes. Hands and skin have longbeen important motifs in his practice, linked inextricably to the manipulation of artistic materials.The fine dermal lines visible in the paintings are, like tree rings, indicators of age; their delicatetextures also speak to the sense of touch as a means of experiencing and knowing the world. Thedimensions of Penone’s paintings—each is a 183 cm square—mirror those of Le Corbusier’s Modulor,an anthropometric scale based on the golden ratio. (The series also recalls Yves Klein’s Anthropométries[1960] in its direct transference of pigment from human body to painterly support.)

Also included in the exhibition, on the gallery’s ground floor, are Svolgere la propria pelle – 10 giugno1970 (To Unroll One’s Skin – June 10, 1970) (1970), one of Penone’s earliest works; drawings from theMaldoror series (1986–88), which was inspired by Comte de Lautréamont’s 1868–69 prose poem ‘LesChants de Maldoror’ and sees Penone using hand imprints to create ‘a changing landscape of signs’;and a large untitled drawing from 1983 that employs some of the same motifs. On the first floor arefive works from the celebrated Propagazioni (Propagations) series (2012), slabs of onyx engraved withfingerprints.

An essay by Carlos Basualdo, Keith L. and Catherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at thePhiladelphia Museum of Art, will be published to accompany the exhibition.

On October 18, 2023, Penone will be appointed a foreign associate member of the Académie desBeaux-Arts in Paris.