Giuseppe Penone
Valdemars Slots Arts Foundation is delighted to present the first solo exhibition in Denmark of Italian artist Giuseppe Penone. Bringing together major early sculptural works, drawings, photographs, and rare archival materials, the exhibition provides rare insight into his extraordinary visual language.
A leading proponent of Arte Povera, Penone’s five decades’-long practice explores the relationship between humans and the natural world. By bringing leaves and trees inside the palace, Penone inverts its grandeur with radical humility, whilst restoring wonder to our experience of nature.
Penone meets visitors to the contemporary galleries with Albero di 8 metri, 2002, a work from the artist’s landmark series initiated in the 1980s. Penone carves, scores and excavates two beams to reveal a younger tree’s trunk and branches within the growth rings. This act of unveiling speaks to the long history embedded in both the palace and forests outside, seen through the tall windows.
A second gallery explores the diverse ways the artist has shaped, created, and documented his sculptures and performances, with a collection of works on paper and rare archival materials. Penone’s rapid, fluid drawing blurs the boundary between human and plant life in Studio per Biforcazione. Gnarled shapes suggest limbs, bodily crevices and embrace, inviting parallels between erotic desire, the creative act of sculpting, and the way in which plants grow and compose their forms in space.
Penone presents Breath of Leaves, 1979, piled up in the adjoining space. The installation records the imprint of the artist’s body and breath in boxwood leaves, pointing to our constant, often invisible exchange with the world around us. Whilst this negative sculpture captures a fleeting interaction, the photographic series Alpi Marittime juxtaposes lasting effects on the natural landscape with an immediate physical sensation. The artist is shown intertwining three young trees, or outlining with a copper wire the diameter of his grip around a growing trunk.
The exhibition’s climax takes place in the rococo Ballroom, which is transformed by the presence of two vast wooden beams that stretch across its length. Leaving the raw geometry of the beams underside untouched, Penone again resurrects the younger trees within. The installation speaks to the expansive wooden floors and also to the ornate frames of three portraits by royal court painter, Carl Gustaf Pilo (SE, 1711–93), which remain on the walls after 300 years. Whilst Pilo represented metaphysical authority through luscious oil paint, Penone conjures a natural power no less poetic for its material simplicity.
“In 2013, celebrated Italian sculptor Giuseppe Penone created a remarkable and very well-attended exhibition at Louis XIV's palace in Versailles. Penone's works, which are in close harmony with nature, entered into a fruitful and happy dialogue with the palace's baroque architecture. The same applies this summer at Valdemars Slot. The sculptor's monumental sculptures occupy the Knights' Hall and three other galleries in the 17th-century building.”
— Per Jonas Storsve, Curator
Artist Bio
Giuseppe Penone (b. 1947, Garessio)
A central figure of the Arte Povera movement, Penone is based between Paris and Turin, Italy. Significant recent solo exhibitions include Serpentine, London (2025); Galleria Borghese, Rome (2023); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2022); Philadelphia Museum of Art (2022); Villa Medici, Rome (2021); Palais d’Iéna – CESE, Paris (2019); and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield (2018). Penone has participated in Documenta (1972, 1982, 1987, 2012) and the Venice Biennale (2007, 1995, 1986, 1980, 1978). In 2023 he was elected Foreign Associate Member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts.