The Brooklyn Rail

Both the hubris and aspiration of human designs vis-a-vis nature are evoked by Giuseppe Penone’s ambitious exhibition at Gagosian. Curated by Adam D. Weinberg, Director Emeritus of the Whitney, the presentation spans the long history of the Italian Arte Povera artist’s engagement with trees, which goes back to the late 1960s. The exhibition’s title, The Reflection of Bronze, references Penone’s use of the traditional sculptural material to highlight the relationship between nature and the manmade, especially as the latter has attempted to memorialize the former in an effort to fend off its inherent impermanence. By including a Roman era bronze mirror from the Brooklyn Museum collection alongside Penone’s Riflesso del bronzo (2005), Weinberg further throws into relief how humans have sought to appropriate elements of nature to reflect aspects of human experience.

With Marsia—cork (2025), Penone abstracts the natural environment into an enveloping patterning of tree bark—here, cork is interspersed with cast bronze elements. The effect emphasizes the architectural container of Gagosian’s 24th Street space, which becomes skin-like with the introduction of the organic texture of cork, a regenerative material. The cracked and distressed cork panels read like flayed hides, through and on top of which bronze castings of foliage break through, their patinated surfaces glowing like they have somehow survived some extreme situation. There is a sense of nature having been stripped down and essentialized, as if some future society had tried to make sense of what has been left behind by ours, pondering the cast remnants of a once flourishing forest.

One room is populated with elegantly sculpted tree trunks, many of them pared down to the point of being unrecognizable except for some projecting stumps, the bronze smoothed to an elegant polish and colored to so closely approximate actual wood that it is sometimes hard to discern the difference. In Un anno di bronzo – Larice (A Year of Bronze – Larch) (2024), a solitary live sapling is cradled within a hollowed-out tree cast in bronze. It rises sinuously out of a mound of dirt like the last survivor of its species. We inevitably compare it to Clepsydra [1] (2012), which consists of the whittled remains of a similarly profiled bronze tree stump, the desiccated remains of which seem to have been ejected from the excavated trunk adjacent to it.

Trattenere 6, 8, 12, 16, 20 anni di crescita (Continuerà a crescere tranne che in quel punto) (To Retain 6, 8, 12, 16, 20 Years of Growth [It Will Continue to Grow except at That Point])(2004–24) engages directly with the question of how we interface with nature. Five bronze tree segments present—we can assume—the five durations specified in the work’s title. The tree limb grows as it progresses, while the forearm and hand (cast from the artist) that grab it remain the same. The use of bronze highlights a timelessness but one that is manufactured. A hubristic attempt to circumvent the natural progression of time through artificial means of freezing and monumentalizing it.

Time is perhaps Penone’s primary concern, and his examination of nature is inherently a play with duration and the extended life cycles of organic entities, as in his early realization that paring back rings of a tree could reveal it at an earlier point in its lifespan. Accordingly, many of the works in the show bring presumably aged trees back to their youths. Those that have been hollowed out look as if their history has been erased; they are petrified in a single state. As such, the interpretations I have laid out are necessarily based on the inescapable context presented by the climate crises of our present moment. When Penone started making this work in the late 1960s, the discourse around ecology was in its infancy. However, the threats of nuclear war and the impinging mechanization of human experience have unfortunately become concerns again and are related to ecological issues. Organic materials, from a supposedly “real” world outside of the “artificial” one of art, were seen by artists of Penone’s generation as having a directness akin to the industrial ones favored by some of their Minimalist peers. Part of the interest in examining a longstanding career, as this exhibition allows us to do, is in seeing how changing contexts shift the meaning of work and thus give ongoing interest to sustained ways of working.