In the 1980s, Giuseppe Penone devoted himself wholly to sculpture using the traditional materials of wax, wood, plaster, earth, bronze, stone and marble. A perception of \u201cthe extreme precariousness of the concept of solid, fluid, hard, soft, positive, negative\u201d guided the artist in his interception of forms, enabling revelations about the state of matter and its transformational dynamics.<\/p>\n
In Vegetal Gestures<\/i>, the idea of fossilizing movement is key to the sculptural process, propagating an idea of \u201cbuilding a giant, human-scale leaf\u201d in which \u201cthe sculptor is like a plant, repeating gestures that, fixed and superimposed, generate that plant\u2019s presence in space.\u201d<\/p>\n
The first bronze Vegetal Gesture<\/i> is a female body modelled on a life-size mannequin. The artist\u2019s gestures <\/i>were shaped using clay, a material that registers the artist\u2019s imprints, from which casting dies were taken. Bronze, the material of choice for Vegetal Gestures, <\/i>allows for the closest approximation of a tree trunk\u2019s natural appearance. In 1980, Penone wrote: \u201cUsing bronze, plant life retains all its appearance and, when placed outdoors, reacts with the climate, oxidizing, taking on the same colours as plants around it, its patina a synthesis of the landscape.\u201d The artist believes that fossilizing gestures \u201cthat have developed in a particular space\u201d is an operation that \u201cbrings man closer to plants, forced to live eternally under the weight of their \u2018gestures\u2019 of lived experience\u201d. By no means coincidentally, the gestures he chose are entirely ordinary movements: \u201cusing gestures taken for granted, real, normal, the heroic spirit of the work of art is tempered, the example of the sacred mundane that lies in all things.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the 1980s, Giuseppe Penone devoted himself wholly to sculpture using the traditional materials of wax, wood, plaster, earth, bronze, stone and marble. A perception of \u201cthe extreme precariousness of the concept of solid, fluid, hard, soft, positive, negative\u201d guided the artist in his interception of forms, enabling revelations about the state of matter and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":13883,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-approfondimenti"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n