Giuseppe Penone. Arbres

This book takes as its starting point the work of Giuseppe Penone, the tree / sculpture Gravity and Growth, installed in Frankfurt in front of the European Central Bank in 2014. It opens a reflection on one of the essential aspects of the artist's research, considered the leader of the Italian Arte Povera movement: Nature, a pretext for a confrontation and a poetic shift with our reality.
The tree is at the beginning of Giuseppe Penone's work in the 1960s and takes the form of a long meditation of which "The Frankfurt Tree" is one of the outcomes. Just as the sap secretly irrigates the tree, the tree's constant thought has always irrigated the artist's imagination. In particular, what Giuseppe Penone perceives in the Nature that surrounds him are not the differences that separate species and materials, but on the contrary what unites them, the attractions that mix them and make them resemble each other...
This book, illustrated with photographs of the artist's works and drawings, invites a meditative exploration and enlightens the reader on one of the most sensitive parts of the artist's work.
The author, Henry-Claude Cousseau, is General Curator of Heritage. He was director of the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris from 2000 to 2011.