Giuseppe Penone: Thoughts in the Roots - Serpentine - Review

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

By now it was approaching midday. The sky was clear, and the sheer number of cars and people always make cities that one fraction hotter. After stopping for a while on a bench in the east of Mayfair, I decided not to attempt any other close by contemporary art galleries. Instead, I made my mind up to head towards my final destination for the day, The Serpentine Gallery.

In the heat, I traipsed through Hyde Park. The sun was high in the sky as I cut through, walking for a good half an hour through the grasslands, under the shaded boughs of trees, and past the grand Serpentine Lake. I stopped for food. On a sunny Friday the park was busy. Unable to find a shaded bench, I made camp under a nearby tree. After resting another while, I repacked my things and headed up to the South Gallery itself.

Beginning to burn out – I now recognise in hindsight – I neglected to take notes on the gallery, and have since misplaced the written handouts I had taken. Instead, I have photographs, memories, and the Gallery website.

The exhibition is ‘Giuseppe Penone: Thoughts in the Roots’. It is on display until September 7. If you are in the area, I highly recommend a visit. It is free to enter, and sprawls outside the gallery in the form of some peculiar and quite memorable sculptures.

Penone, per the gallery, is a ‘leading figure in the Arte Povera’, a movement centred on natural materials and simple techniques. His art is comprised of wood, sticks, leaves, and inks made of grasses and sap. As one enters the Serpentine Gallery, they are faced with a strange hollow tree trunk, above which, on the walls, a pair of closed eyes, crafted seemingly out of rose thorns, peers down at them. A lot of the works are site specific installations. I asked a visitor assistant, who confirmed that Penone had been present at the installation here in the gallery. The works, remounted from their original context, are still strong, and very calming.

Due to his materials, the exhibition maintains a very controlled colour palette. Muted browns and greens evoke a forest floor in these sunlit, whitewashed rooms. It is an odd contrast, but not jarring. Situated within the park itself, the building of the gallery becomes the anomaly. The outside world of plantlife is brought inside. In the cool of the building, a visitor is treated to a more evergreen experience, pine and silver birches opposing the more lush Victoriana green of Hyde Park.

The crux of the exibition sits centrally within the gallery. There are no windows. Instead, blocks of dried leaves, retaining their deep forest green, panel the walls. It is an installation named ‘Respirare l’ombra (To Breathe the Shadow)’. Part of the artwork is a single impossible branch, leafed at both ends, piercing a clay mask, itself turned towards the leaf-walls. The entire room has the thick, unmistakeable scent of a forest, old and dank. There is something primal, folkloric, about the work. It is a remarkable place to exist in. Calm, contempletive, restorative, but at the same time a place above the human experience. This forest doesn’t care about you, yet it was intricately constructed, reconstructed, by human hands. It is shaded and cool.

Continuing a clockwise Journey, we find a room with great works on cloth. They are inked in a fading green, materials made from plant matter. In their depiction of the wood line it is hard not to see figures, or movement. Some ancient impulse to observe potential dangers in the natural environment. One piece comes from 1986, the other from 2017. You can see the difference in colour, with one more faded, holding a different depth.

Also in this room stand figures. They grow out of plant pots. The imagery is strikingly similar to a sequence in Garland’s Annihilation in which an individual submits to nature, gracefully becoming plant matter themselves. The figures are mid stride, yet their ceramic pot bases seem sad in their rootedness.

Leaving the exhibition, I encounter more of Penone’s sculptural work. Outside stand a handful of trees that park visitors seemingly cannot make heads nor tails of. One stands as if struck by lightning, only the interior is a bright gold. The sculpture is made of bronze, yet appears lifelike enough to pass as a real tree. Next to this, a pair of trees, each with large boulders caught in the crooks of their boughs. I hear a passerby wonder aloud how the stones got up there, as if the entire assemblage was somehow a natural occurance. I don’t blame their amazement. The small placque indicating that this, too, is a bronze and river stone sculpture is hard to spot. For a park-goer, without the information and context given within the Serpentine Gallery, these artworks are not immediately identifiable as such. Their natural form, and bizarre possibility, allow them to be seen as genuine aspects of nature. It effectively challenges our distinctions of natural and constructed.

Overall I was absolutely spellbound by Penone’s work. I felt that the Gallery space had both insightfully presented it, and also added a new layer by stratifying levels of inside and outside, of natural and unnatural. The central sanctum of ‘Respirare l’ombra’ perhaps being my favourite artwork encountered that day. His entire body of work taps into something deeply human. A reverence for the natural, and an ancient comfort that can be felt when in nature. The curation displayed by the team at the Serpentine is praiseworthy – especially the bizarre encounter they have provided outside for passers by.

‘Giuseppe Penone: Thoughts in the Roots’ is on display at the Serpentine South Gallery between April 3 - September 7 and is free to enter.  

★ ★ ★ ★ ★