Tue 14 Nov 2017 to Fri 22 Dec 2017
24 West 57th Street, NY 10019 Giuseppe Penone: A Question of Identity, 2017
Mon-Sat 10am-6pm
Artist: Giuseppe Penone
The gallery hosts a special exhibition by Giuseppe Penone, which features a unique installation, A question of identity, (Una questione di identità), 2017, one of the most meditative works created by the artist to date.
Consisting up of multiple works from 1981 to the present to create a whole installation, A Question of Identity crystallized in the artist’s mind over three decades ago, but was realized just this past year. With its incarnation here, Penone refines to a stringent purity his search for the expression of the elemental identity unique to all of us which defines the essence of his work, the unity between man and nature, and the search for our place within the incomprehensible magnitude of the natural world. In this exhibition, the artist offers us a glimpse of arrested time and of eternity through essential works which ask us to contemplate the identity of an imprint, the identity of a river stone, the identity of a grain of sand molded by the wind.
At the center of the gallery space stands Essere vento (To be the wind), 2014. A tree trunk of petrified wood suggests physically incalculable time, standing at a height which enables the viewer to peer down onto the top of the tree to see an impression of a hand carved into the wood. Penone writes:
"The void of the imprint of a hand dug out in the silicon dioxide of a fossilized trunk, an imprint that can duplicate the hand and the identity of the man to whom it belongs, an imprint that holds the identity of a grain of sand, eroded, cracked, carved, polished, scratched by the wind, duplicated in a grain of sand by a photonic wind."
Looking more closely, in the void of the palm of the hand sit two grains of sand, representing two opposing images of unity and of infinity: A grain of sand taken from the desert, repeated perfectly in its specific form in another larger sized grain of sand capable of containing it. Poised next to each other, one echoes nature and the other is man-made, carved by lasers to replicate sand’s physical qualities, with the artist working closely with physicists and nanotechnologists at the Institut Néel du CNRS in Grenoble to achieve this microscopic sculpture.
Set side by side on top of the severed trunk of a fossilized tree- plant becomes mineral-these two identical grains of sand, poised between unity and infinity, mark human presence. Because of their perfect twinship they suddenly appear in this cycle of universal metamorphoses, the constant movement continues to modify the nature and appearance of things, just like those two grains of sand which have, for the moment, stalled the machine. - Guy Tosatto
Nearby, a work amplified in scale and relative to the above, titled Essere fiume (To be the river), 1981, echoes the physical qualities of the previous, consisting of two large stones - one a found and natural river stone and the other its identically carved doppelgänger.
To extract a stone sculpted by the river, to travel upstream and discover the exact point from which the stone came and extract another piece of rock from the mountain and duplicate exactly the stone taken from the river is to be the river; producing a stone of stone is perfect sculpture, it reenters nature and is cosmic heritage, a pure creation. - GP
In conjunction with these works, Propagazione, 2006, a drawing on a scroll containing the artist’s single fingerprint in ink radiating in successive rotations of dense concentric rings, hangs on an adjacent wall. Beginning with an impression signifying our cultural index of individuality—the imprint of the skin—it evolves into a landscape of the body, with its expanse and its limits. Nearby, Albero di 3,50 metri, 1985, a sculpture hand-carved from the trunk of a tree, bears the whittled twigs and intrinsic knots of its existence. Resting on its side on a large plinth it preserves its memory as a young sapling while also displaying the mark of time of growth in the forest.