MUSÉE CANTONAL DES BEAUX-ARTS DE LAUSANNE

Transcription

1 PRESS RELEASE MUSÉE CANTONAL DES BEAUX-ARTS DE LAUSANNE

2 GIUSEPPE PENONE. Regards croisés You are cordially invited to a press conference on Thursday 24 September 2015 at 11 am The artist will be present Even more Nuit des musées Saturday 26 September 2015, 2 pm 2 am Opening reception Thursday 24 September 2015 at 6.30 pm Press contact Loïse Cuendet, [email protected] Tél. direct: +41 (0) To download press images: press relations User name: mcba-presse / Password: gpresse Address Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne Palais de Rumine, place de la Riponne 6 CH-1014 Lausanne Tel.: +41 (0) Fax.: +41 (0) [email protected] Opening hours Tue.- Fri. : 11 am 6 pm Sat.- Sun. : 11 am 5 pm Mon. : closed 26 Sept. : 2 am 2 pm 30 Sept. : 11 am 4 pm 24, 31 Dec., 2 Jan. : 11 am 5 pm 25 Dec., 1 st Jan. : closed Admissions Adults : CHF 10. Pensioners, students, apprentices : CHF 8. Under 16 : free 1 st Saturday of the month : free Access Metro M2 : station Riponne Maurice Béjart Bus 1, 2 : stop at Rue Neuve Bus 7, 8 : stop at Riponne Maurice Béjart

3 GIUSEPPE PENONE. Regards croisés THE EXHITIBION The Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, is presenting French-speaking Switzerland s first exhibition by Giuseppe Penone (b. Garessio, Italy, 1947, lives and works in Turin). The exhibition has been prepared in close collaboration with the artist. «The skin of the universe is mirrored on the tip of the pencil, the surface of the sculpture on the skin of the hands» Giuseppe Penone, 2002 Every great sculptor is also a great draughtsman and Giuseppe Penone is living proof of this. Here the first museum exhibition by this major Arte Povera figure in Frenchspeaking Switzerland reverses the usual practice of spotlighting Penone s sculptures, with his preliminary drawings serving as backup. For this exhibition drawing is our point of departure, with the sculptures appearing only in counterpoint: drawings by Penone himself, of course, but also works on paper from his personal collection, by names like Alberto Giacometti, Amadeo Modigliani, Giacomo Balla, Pierre Bonnard, Kazimir Malevich and Louis Soutter. An exchange of points of view, then, regarding different media, different creative time frames and different forms of expression. Formal likeness is a minor concern here: what these interchanges between the graphic worlds of Penone and his illustrious peers reveal are subtle elective affinities and a lesser-known, more intimate side of the Italian artist. The exhibition comprises close to a hundred of Penone s drawings dating from 1967 to 2006, thirteen drawings by other artists, two big Verde del bosco frottages from 1984, a selection of the famous Gesto vegetale bronzes entwined around plants, the big Spazio di luce (2008), recently shown at Versailles, and a handsome figurative sculpture from 1983 which has never been exhibited before. The museum s two biggest rooms are given over to the sculptures, with the other spaces or «cabinets» housing the drawings ; the result is an alternation between the infinitely small and the infinitely large, between the idea of conceptual development and the finished work. Visual interplay, then, between drawing and sculpture, drawings by Penone and other artists, and diametrically opposite notions of drawing : as a medium for ideas and preliminary note-taking, but also as a specific, freestanding form of expression in the dual sense of the terms dessein in French and disegno in Italian. Page 3

4 PUBLICATION Giuseppe Penone. Regard croisés Catalogue in French, edited by Bernard Fibicher, with essays by Giuseppe Penone, Didier Semin, Bernard Fibicher and Ruggero Penone. 22,5 x 29,4 cm, hard cover, 160 pages, 134 coloured illustrations. 5 Continents, Milan and Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Price : CHF 38.- / after the exhibition : CHF 45.- Order direct from the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts (postage and packing charges apply) THE VIEWING ITINERARY Room 1.1 What Penone likes about Giacomo Balla is «the lines that construct the space of an object» ; and about Hans Richter, «the overlaid lines that construct the volume of a sound compressed inside a bourgeois space». The sketch by Balla, the Italian Futurist, is in fact a project for a piece of knockdown furniture, and is structured by straight lines that provide a grid for the deployment of circles and triangles. The theme of the geometrical as opposed to the organic is central to ten Penone drawings that make no secret of their character as concrete projects : drawing in the sense of dessein, disegno, design. The Hans Richter sketch, all angles and vigorous hatching, shows a violinist standing behind a woman seated at a piano. It interacts with Penone s drawings and their forthrightly «matieristic» and «sexual» contrasts. Room 1.2 This part of the exhibition brings together various Propagazione works by Penone dating from with Adolfo Wildt s delicately nuanced concentric circles and Amadeo Modigliani s harmoniously arranged arcs. In these compositions Penone applies his ten fingers to a single sheet or ten sheets of paper and expands the initial fingerprints with fine, concentric pencil lines like topographies of unknown lands. In this way he sets up complex relationships between tip and surface, centrifugal and centripetal movements, micro- and macrocosm, the individual and the universal. The onyx he used for the most recent of his Propagazione drawings, in 2012, is one of the stones rejected by the modernists on the grounds of their ornamental character, but often used by the virtuoso sculptor Wildt. Page 4

5 Room 2 Entirely devoted to nature, Room 2 has been transformed into a huge glasshouse. Against a backdrop of Penone s Verde del bosco (The Green of the Forest), gigantic compositions obtained by rubbing green leaves on tree trunks, it houses two groups of sculptures titled Struttura del tempo (Structure of Time) and Gesto vegetale (Vegetal Gesture). The Struttura del tempo works are kinds of imaginary, three-dimensional chronophotographs of the growth of a tree. Placing a branch on the ground, Penone repeatedly covers its length with clay «snakes» of similar dimensions until the limits of its equilibrium are reached; he then casts the branch and snakes in bronze, endowing growth with a spatial dimension and constructing kinds of «natural dwellings». His Gesto vegetale pieces are bronze human figures in classical poses reclining, standing, walking, crouching, etc. with only their «skeletons» made by the artist: the creation of volume is left to nature. It is interesting to note that the works in this room display subtle links with the drawings in the adjacent spaces (1 and 3). Room 3.1 Of Alberto Giacometti, another artist whose drawing is indissociable from sculpture, Giuseppe Penone has said, «Giacometti s drawings are related to the idea of sculpture: he finds form through an accumulation of gestures while, at the same time, we see this idea of effacement, of cancellation of the individual s body. He does this with space, too: in the drawings of the studio, the drawings of interior space, there s this way of working that destroys» From Giacometti Penone has taken interior views which magically bring out the volume of a few intersecting lines exactly like the dripped watercolour that provided the preliminary sketches for the series of Penone s Pelle di foglie (Skins of Leaves), with their silhouettes of spiky branches pointing in all directions. In his studies of breathing Penone tries to suggest invisible volumes produced by the human body, but somehow detached from it. Room 3.2 Three Pierre Bonnard drawings in a completely different style serve as an «introduction» to this section. «In Bonnard s drawings,» Penone writes, «there s a gradual expunging of the image. The character loses its structure, loses its individual presence, and becomes part of a whole; it becomes painting.» His own Transparencies and Anatomies are drawings that try to «create zones of matter, of light, while cancelling forms out and making them interpenetrate» a way of working he admires in Bonnard. Among Penone s drawings, it is these ones, so markedly «value-inflected», that tend most strongly towards painting. Page 5

6 Room 4 «It s the idea of contact,» says Giuseppe Penone, «and thus always the idea of sculpture: you touch things and you understand them through touch.» Gesture and imprint are the themes of this «cabinet» at whose centre stands an old sculpture, never shown before. This is a bust of the artist s son, Ruggero, which Penone made by placing his hands on the child s head and immediately transferring his tactile memory to a block of clay. The hands of the father thus recreated the son s head in a near-divine gesture. A Gesto vegetale group of drawings, a late finger painting by Louis Soutter and a gestural composition by Henri Michaux counterpoint a work which, while unique in the Penone oeuvre, remains totally consistent with his «philosophy». Room 5 Room 5 is home to a single, meaningfully complex sculpture: Spazio di luce. A bronze tree trunk cut into eight segments extends before the viewer like an enormous centipede. As we approach, we find that the trunk has in fact been hollowed out and coloured gold on the inside. Thus the tree, while reaching out through its branches, inwardly offers a space for the light which it needs in order to live, but which is usually halted by the bark. On closer inspection, however, we realise that the interior is a replica of the bark, while the exterior bears traces of the sculptor s hands: this because he personally applied to the trunk the layer of wax called for by the casting process. The artist sees this layer as the last growth ring in the tree s life cycle and a sign of the merging of the human and vegetal worlds. Room 6 This final «cabinet» is a tribute to Kazimir Malevich, whose radical abstraction, far removed from any notion of nature, would seem to set him at the opposite pole from Penone. What Penone is interested in, though, is this Suprematist artist s mystical side, and in particular the cross that seems to turn in space. As Penone has said, «The sensations of movement, projection and ascent of the shapes are accentuated by a few light marks that repeat the square and the cross on the lower part of the paper. These marks suggest a helical movement in space, an ascent resembling the growth spiral of plants.» In addition to a black square anti-suprematist because essentially organic the Italian has included a series of 24 drawing-collages of imprints of leaves and parts of the body coated with graphite powder and pigment; the imprints are lifted off with sticky tape and glued onto paper. Taking their inspiration from the movements of the cross, these works effect a concrete synthesis of the human, vegetal and extra-sensory (mystical, divine, cosmic?) worlds. Page 6

7 GIUSEPPE PENONE Solo exhibitions (selection) 1969 Giuseppe Penone, Galleria Gian Enzo Sperone, Torino 1970 Giuseppe Penone, Aktionsraum 1, Munich 1977 Giuseppe Penone. Bäume Augen Haare Wände Tongefäss, Kunstmuseum, Luzern 1978 Giuseppe Penone. Objekte, Zeichnungen, Projektionen, Fotos, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden ; Giuseppe Penone. Objekte und Wandzeichnungen, Museum Folkwang, Essen 1980 Giuseppe Penone, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam ; Giuseppe Penone, Ausstellung Studio, Mönchengladbach ; Arbeiten aus Mönchengladbach , InK Halle für Internationale Neue Kunst, Zurich 1983 Giuseppe Penone, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa ; Fort Worth Art Museum, Fort Worth ; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago 1984 Giuseppe Penone, ARC Musée d art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris 1985 Cinq Artistes, Quatre Châteaux et une Abbaye en Gironde, Château de Malle, Preignac 1986 Giuseppe Penone, Musée de Peinture et Sculpture, Grenoble ; Giuseppe Penone, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes ; Giuseppe Penone. Creuser la Mémoire de la Boue (Exercice de sculpture), Palais des Beaux-Arts, Charleroi 1988 Giuseppe Penone, Musée Rodin, Paris 1989 Giuseppe Penone. Recent Sculpture, Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol ; Giuseppe Penone. Recent Sculpture, Dean Clough Art Foundation, Halifax ; Giuseppe Penone, Galleria d Arte Moderna Villa delle Rose, Bologna 1991 Giuseppe Penone. Foglie e suture, Eglise de Courmelois, Reims/Valde-Vesle ; Penone. L Espace de la main, Ancienne Douane, Strasbourg ; Giuseppe Penone, Castello di Rivoli Museo d Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli 1992 Penone. Le acque, i venti, le genti, gli alberi, i serpi sono vene di pietra, Réfectoire de l Abbaye de Tournus, Tournus 1993 Giuseppe Penone, Musée-Château d Annecy, Annecy 1994 Giuseppe Penone, Centro Culturale Teresa Orsola Bussa De Rossi, Fossano ; Giuseppe Penone. L image du toucher, FRAC Fond Régional d Art Contemporain de Picardie, Amiens 1997 Giuseppe Penone. Die Adern des Steins, Kunstmuseum ; Giuseppe Penone. The veins of stone, Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Toyota ; Giuseppe Penone, Carré d Art, Musée d art contemporain, Nîmes / De Pont Foundation for Contemporary Art, Tilburg / Galleria Civica d Arte Contemporanea, Trento 1999 Giuseppe Penone , CGAC Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela 2000 Giuseppe Penone. Respirare l ombra, Synagoge Stommeln, Pulheim 2002 Giuseppe Penone. Spoglia d oro su spine d acacia, Spazio per l arte contemporanea Tor Bella Monaca, Rome ; Giuseppe Penone. Paesaggi del cervello, ex Chiesa della Maddalena, Pesaro Giuseppe Penone (b. Garessio, Italy, 1947) lives and works in Turin Giuseppe Penone. The Imprint of Drawing, The Drawing Center, New York / Milton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes ; Penone. Rétrospective, Galerie Sud, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris ; Giuseppe Penone. Retrospectiva, CaixaForum, Fundación la Caixa, Barcelona 2006 Giuseppe Penone, CeSAC Centro Sperimentale per le Arti Contemporanee, Il Filatoio, Caraglio / Galerie du CAIRN, Musée-Promenade, Saint-Benoît, Digne-les-Bains ; Giuseppe Penone, Museum Kurhaus, Kleve 2007 Giuseppe Penone. Sculture di linfa, Padiglione Italiano, 52. Esposizione Internazionale d Arte, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice 2008 Giuseppe Penone, Académie de France à Rome, Villa Medici, Roma ; Giuseppe Penone, MAMbo Museo d Arte Moderna di Bologna, Bologne ; Giuseppe Penone, Galleria Italia, AGO Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto 2009 Giuseppe Penone. Matrice de sève, ENSBA École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, Cabinet des dessins Jean Bonna-Cour vitrée du Palais des études, Paris ; Giuseppe Penone, Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Toyota ; Giuseppe Penone, Museo de la Ciudad, Quito ; Giuseppe Penone. Nelle mani. Opere dal 1968 al 2008, Tucci Russo Studio per l Arte Contemporanea, Torre Pellice 2010 Giuseppe Penone. Nelle mani - In the Hands, De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg ; Giuseppe Penone. Des veines, au ciel, ouvertes, MAC s Musée des Arts Contemporains de la Communauté Française de Belgique au Grand-Hornu, Hornu 2011 Giuseppe Penone, Haunch of Venison, London ; Giuseppe Penone. Neue Arbeiten, Konrad Fischer Galerie, Berlin 2012 Giuseppe Penone, Centre d arts et de nature, Parc du Château, Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire ; Traversées, La Fabrique du Pont d Aleyrac, Saint-Pierreville / Pas d Panique, Lagorce; Château du Pin, Fabras / Sur le sentier des lauzes, Saint-Mélany ; Giuseppe Penone, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York ; Giuseppe Penone. Spazio di Luce, The Bloomberg Commission, Whitechapel Gallery, London ; Giuseppe Penone, Haunch of Venison, London ; Giuseppe Penone. Intersecting Gaze / Sguardo incrociato, Gagosian Gallery, London 2013 Giuseppe Penone, Kunstmuseum, Winterthur ; Penone Versailles, Château de Versailles ; Giuseppe Penone. Alfabeto, Chapelle Saint-Martin-du-Méjan, Arles ; Giuseppe Penone. Ideas of Stone, Madison Square Park, New York 2014 Giuseppe Penone. Prospettiva vegetale, Forte di Belvedere et Giardino di Boboli, Florence ; Giuseppe Penone. Ramificazioni del Pensiero / Branches of Thought, Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles ; Breath is a Sculpture, Beirut Art Center, Beirut ; Giuseppe Penone, Musée de Grenoble, Grenoble 2015 Giuseppe Penone, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York Page 7

8 VISITS AND EVENTS Guided tours 8 October at pm 15 October at 6.30 pm 29 October pm 19 October at 6.30 pm 3 October at 6.30 pm 10 October pm Tour in sign language 4 October at 3 pm A collaboration with (please pre-enrol) Drawing workshops for adults 14 November, 2-5 pm «L anatomie de la végétation» A creative itinary through the exhibition. With the artist Claudia Renna. Price : CHF 30.- (please pre-enrol) Lecture 26 November at 8 pm Giuseppe Penone : le temps des arbres, le temps des pierres, le nôtre By Didier Semin, Art Historian and Professor, Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Free Young visitors Discovery booklet Activities in the exhibition From 6 years, free Parent-child drawing tour 28 October and 25 November, 2 am 4.30 pm Parents are invited to bring along their children and draw the works as a family to spark a discussion about the nature of art. (please pre-enrol) Page 8

9 PRESS IMAGES press relations Username: mcba-presse Password: gpresse All rights reserved. This reproduction authorisation is agreed on the basis of the following conditions: complete and unaltered reproduction of the works. Full mention of the captions. Web: the site must comprise the following notice: All rights reserved. Reproduction and all use of the works other than individual and private consultation are forbidden without prior authorisation. Verde del bosco con camicia [Forest green with shirt], Frottage with leaves on canvas, 264,5 x 470 cm. Photo : Archivio Penone, Turin 2015, ProLitteris, Zurich Spazio di luce [Space of light], Bronze, gold, 8 parts, total dimensions c. 250 x 2000 x 180 cm. Photo : Archivio Penone, Turin 2015, ProLitteris, Zurich Page 9

10 Studio per Biforcazione [Study for Bifurcation], 1986 Pencil on paper, 48 x 33 cm Photo : Archivio Penone, Turin 2015, ProLitteris, Zurich Amedeo Modigliani Caryatid with Raised Arms, 1913 Pencil on paper, 27 x 21 cm Studio per Gesto vegetale [Study for vegetal gesture], Ink on paper, 63,8 x 94,5 cm. Photo : Archivio Penone, Turin 2015, ProLitteris, Zurich Progetto per lenti a contatto specchianti Guardare la strada [Project of reflecting contact lenses Looking at the road], Pencil on paper, 42 x 27 cm. Photo : Archivio Penone, Turin 2015, ProLitteris, Zurich Page 10

11 Le Foglie della pelle [The leaves of the skin], Pigments and tape on paper, 48 x 33 cm. Photo : Archivio Penone, Turin. 2015, ProLitteris, Zurich Kasimir Malevitch Untitled, 1914 Pencil on laid paper, 14,4 x 10,1 cm Page 11

12 Tre parole dette nello stesso momento [Three words uttered at the same time], Ink and pencil on paper, 50 x 35 cm. Photo : Archivio Penone, Turin 2015, ProLitteris, Zurich Giacomo Balla Disegno del mobile smontabile [Drawing of dismountable furniture], 1920 Pencil on paper maroufloged to canvas, 21,2 x 32,7 cm 2015, ProLitteris, Zurich Page 12