Giuseppe Penone
Valdemars Slots Arts Foundation is delighted to present the first solo exhibition in Denmark by celebrated Italian artist Giuseppe Penone. Bringing together major early sculptures, drawings, photographs, and rare archival materials, the exhibition provides rare insight into his poetic visual language.
A leading proponent of Arte Povera, Penone’s five decades’-long practice explores the relationship between humans and nature. By bringing leaves and trees inside the palace, Penone inverts its grandeur with radical humility, whilst restoring wonder to our experience of the natural world.
Ascending the main staircase, visitors encounter the monumental Albero di 8 metri, 2002, from a landmark series of sculptures initiated in the 1980s. Penone carves, scores and excavates two beams to reveal younger trees’ trunks and branches enclosed in the growth rings. This act of unveiling speaks to the long history embedded within the palace and also the estate’s forests, seen through the tall windows.
A second gallery explores the diverse ways in which the artist has shaped and documented his sculptures and performances, with a collection of works on paper and rare archival materials. In Studio per Biforcazione, Penone’s rapid, fluid drawing blurs the boundary between human and plant life. Gnarled shapes suggest 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 the artist’s lasting effects on the natural landscape with his immediate physical sensations. The artist intertwines three young trees, outlines with a copper wire the diameter of his grip around a growing trunk, and raises a metal cage with a growing tree.
The exhibition’s climax takes place in the Ballroom, its rococo architecture transformed by the presence of two vast wooden beams, stretching across its length. Leaving the raw geometry of their undersides untouched, Penone again cuts into the beams to resurrect the younger trees within. The installation speaks 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 represents metaphysical authority through luscious oil paint, Penone conjures a natural energy whose power lies in 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.