LONDON.- Marian Goodman Gallery announced an exhibition of works by Giovanni Anselmo, Giulio Paolini and Giuseppe Penone which marks the gallery’s debut presentation at Frieze Masters, presenting works made between 1965-1999. These three Italian artists have formed a core aspect of the gallery program for nearly 30 years.
All three artists are based in Turin and their respective practices chart the history and trajectory of modern Italian art production, including varying degrees of association with the Arte Povera movement. Arte Povera, a title granted by the curator Germano Celant to unify the revolutionary work being made around Italy in the 1960s, took a radical political and economic stance. Artists began attacking the values of established institutions of government, industry, and culture and rejecting the quasi-precious art making materials of oil paint, marble or bronze. Arte Povera brought focus to a wide range of other natural, throwaway materials including soil, rocks and trees which disrupted and challenged the perceived industrialisation and commericalisation of the art market and gallery system.
Giovanni Anselmo (born 1934) lives between Turin and the volcanic island of Stromboli, a place of continued inspiration to the artist. It was here, in 1965 that Anselmo came to understand the origins of the finite and infinite, the significance of natural law and their forces; gravity, energy, balance and magnetism and the importance of equilibrium, which became the foundations of his work.
These explorations of tension, nature and force are exemplified in Oltremare, 1984 in which a jagged fragment of granite, rooted to the ground, leans toward a small square of ultramarine pigment - ‘Oltremare’ (‘overseas’) painted directly to the wall. Both preventing the granite fragment from succumbing to gravity and falling, and deftly balancing towards a precise point upon the wall, a noose of woven metal wire circles the granite’s tip and held taught, is anchored to the ground. At once both precarious and resolute, the work and its component materials, literally and strikingly captures and displays these natural forces.
Oltremare, 1984 is an iconic example an ongoing series of works by Anselmo which juxtapose the simplest of natural objects. The solid mass of stone in its original state, granite, alongside the poetic and ethereal pigment of another, the ultramarine, derived from grinding down lapis lazuli - which visually cues the invisible, natural forces which govern our reality, and mans coexistence with nature, the elemental and the infinite. For Anselmo, ultramarine is indicative of the Mediterranean, borne out of his epiphany on the shores of Stromboli as exampled in the work on paper La Mia Ombra Verso L'Infinito Della Cima Dello Stromboli Durante L'Alba Del 16 Agosto 1965 (Study C), 1965-1999.
As the artist Tacita Dean notes: 'On the 16th August 1965, Giovanni Anselmo had an epiphany on the slopes of the volcanic island of Stromboli. It was both defining and definitive... Standing with his face to the sun for a photograph Anselmo realised he had no shadow. As the shutter clicked, he perceived that his shadow was actually being projected into the sky and rendered invisible, and that all that he normally recognised as evidence of himself on the surface of the earth was now connecting him to the greater infinity of space. And suddenly he felt a true and actual cosmic integration.' (Tacita Dean, Giovanni Anselmo exh. cat, Bologna 2006, p.193)
Giulio Paolini (born 1940) lives in Turin. Although critic Germano Celant invited Paolini to participate within his Arte Povera defining exhibitions, Paolini has always maintained a clear distinction from the existential, vitalistic phenomenology which defined the movement. Paolini’s practice is one rooted within art history and primarily an exploration of the figurative.
Both Ante Litteram, 1985 and Mimesi, 1975 presented here, riff on classical figurative sculpture and antiquity, they are cast fragmented body parts in chalk, yet their presentation is altogether contemporary. These works proceed Paolini’s key work Elegia, 1969 presented at the 1970 Venice Biennale, in which the eye of Michelangelo’s iconic David with a fragment of mirror applied to the pupil. Repetition, mirroring and the idea of the double, were key themes investigated by Paolini during this period.
In Mimesi, 1975, two identical plaster cast sculptural busts are positioned face to face, in an unbroken, continuous glance that is only received and returned by its same. This significant sculptural work is shown alongside the lithograph La perspective pratique, 1977, which again evidences this mirroring and projecting in the repetition of active artist to passive subject. Both Mimesi, 1975 and Ante Litteram, 1985 in which a series of bleached-white classical figurative sculptural sections are presented stacked atop a plain white gallery plinth and Perspex vitrine which holds the severed cast of an open-palmed hand mirroring the arm-stretched closed clenched fist above, investigates the principle founding concepts of Paolini’s timeless practice, of reproduction, representation and historical repetition.
Giuseppe Penone (born 1947) also based in Turin. In a conflation of Arte Povera and Land Art, Penone’s sculptures, installations and drawings are distinguished by an almost exclusive employment of natural forms, in their varying guises. The tree, particularly the trunk, in appearance so closely resembling the human figure, is a central element in Penone's work.
‘The clarity of the well-marked path is sterile. To find the path, to follow it, to examine it, and to clear away the tangled undergrowth: that is sculpture. This statement, written in 1983 reflects Penone’s relationship with nature.
Penone’s practice of the mark making of human interaction within nature was founded in the late 1960s in a forest outside of Garessio, where he would weave together fallen branches, pierce trees with nails and entwine trunks with metal wire to create his sculptures. Many of his sculptures retain the physical traces made upon them, the intertwining of tree branches within his sculptures, as evidenced both in Ombra di terra, 1999, in which the indentations and strata of a human fingerprint are rendered three dimensional in terracotta, segmented into three conical sections, the bisected finger print, a unique human identifier, is supported by a series of bronzed tree branches.
Ombra di terra, 1999 is juxtaposed against the more minimal Albero di 2 metri, 1989 in which the core of a felled tree, standing 2-metres tall leans against the wall. Penone took industrial hand-sawed pieces of timber and employing the most traditional of methods, used chisels, following the naturally occurring knots within the planks to reveal and make visible natural processes which are normally hidden and return to the blank industrialised plank, the natural shape of a tree. In leaving the underside of the underside of the tree form in its minimal beam state, Penone evidences the relationship of industry and nature.
‘What most intrigues me, a constant concern of my poetic vision, is the relationship between the real time of growth and the personal time of 'flaying'. The curiosity of discovering a new tree, and hence a new story, every time, and the stimulus in this sense that comes to me from the imaginative quality of every door, table, window, or board - all of which contain the image of a tree - explain the motivation and urgency of my recourse to this kind of operation, which is not repetition, but a new adventure every time.’ (Germano Celant, Giuseppe Penone, exhibition catalogue, Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol 1989, p.55)
Counter to these sculptural works are a series of ink on paper drawings from the late 1960s to 1999 – these works depict again the uniquely repeating forms and patterns found in nature central to his oeuvre over the past thirty years. Fingerprint (mountain), 1994, Il Respiro Vegetale, I Respiro Animale, 1968 and Propagazione, 1997 each display variations of instinctively drawn uneven concentric rings which allude to the annual growth rings found within the trunks of trees. Penone’s fingerprint lies at the center, evoking a sense of pressure where the touch of the artist has given rise to ripples emanating outwards.
To Turn One’s Eyes Inside Out, 1970, a series of nine photographs presented here depicts Penone wearing mirrored contact lenses, continues this notion of reversal. Instead of receiving images from outside for later transformation into art, the artist’s eyes become screens on which to display an immediate picture of the world.
The presentation of these important historical works by Giovanni Anselmo, Giulio Paolini and Giuseppe Penone not only reflect each of their significant contribution to the international art historical canon, but also the founding principles of the Marian Goodman Gallery program.
