NEW YORK, NY.- Gagosian announced The Reflection of Bronze, an exhibition of new bronze sculptures by Giuseppe Penone, on view at 555 West 24th Street. This is the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery in New York and marks the debut of two major bodies of work. Curated by Adam D. Weinberg, director emeritus of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, it is rooted in Penone’s late-1960s exploration of trees, which led to his celebrated carved tree works and now culminates in sculptures that render the same subject permanent in metal.

Throughout his career, Penone, a protagonist of radical Italian movement Arte Povera, has used a range of materials and forms to explore connections between human life and the natural world at large. In The Reflection of Bronze, he employs the titular alloy to trace the passage of time and the perpetuity of change. As noted by Weinberg in his essay on the exhibition, “Bronze for [Penone] is not a more permanent, more marketable substitute. . . . Rather, his use of bronze involves a profound, rich, varied, and lifelong response to enduring artistic questions.” Bronze partially surrendered its former prominence as an artistic material following the Second World War, but regained some currency through radical new approaches to its use—often involving its juxtaposition with other materials—pioneered by Penone and his contemporaries. The works on view in New York also derive from his early realization that, by excising the rings surrounding the knots in a wood beam, he could reveal the form of a tree at an earlier stage of its life.

The Reflection of Bronze is structured as a three-room sequence. The first space is lined floor-to-ceiling in sheets of cork—the renewable bark of the cork oak tree—to create an enveloping environment paired with bronze elements, alluding to the regenerative capacity of skin. In the center of the room stands Marsia (Marsyas) (2024), a sculpture inspired by the Greek myth of Marsyas, the satyr who lost a musical contest to Apollo and was condemned to be flayed alive hanging from a tree. Penone refers to the story—imaged famously by Titian—in two connected bronze branches, one with bark and one bare, which evoke Marsyas’s skinned and inverted figure.

The second room houses four sculptures from 2012 and 2024, all titled Clepsydra (Water Clock). Evocative images of chronology, these works consist of bronze casts of carved tree trunks—the first time that Penone has used the metal to reproduce these particular forms. Also on view is Un anno di bronzo – Larice (A Year of Bronze – Larch) (2024), a sculpture of a tree’s bark in bronze that houses a real living plant, as well as an early carved wood sculpture and 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), a set of five bronze trunks cast at successive intervals, each one grasped at its center by a cast of the artist’s hand. This motif also refers to the foundational Alpi Marittime (Maritime Alps) actions that Penone executed in the forested landscape of Piedmont in 1968.

The exhibition’s final room focuses on the passage of time in Riflesso del bronzo (The Reflection of Bronze) (2005), a row of bronze panels. The first of these is polished and reflective, while each subsequent element—a cast of its predecessor—incorporates further markers of the traditional casting process. Bronze here assumes an intimate feel, becoming, according to Penone, “a perpetually imitating material, precious and humble, laden with history” that confronts and embodies metamorphosis (or, in Weinberg’s words, “what happens in the pause, the conceptual space between nature and culture, art and artifact”). The inclusion of an Egyptian bronze mirror from c. 1539–1478 BCE, on loan from the Brooklyn Museum, New York, renders these interconnected reflections on past and present all the more visible and embedded.

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated publication featuring an essay by Weinberg and a conversation between Weinberg and Penone.