Giuseppe Penone

All along the year 2020 several works by the artist Giuseppe Penone will travel over the territory of the Grand Est Region, establishing between Metz and Sarrebrück cross-border links dear to the Centre Pompidou-Metz ever since its collaboration with the Saarlandmuseum in 2016 on the occasion of the exhibition Entre deux horizons.

Born in 1947, in Italy's Piedmont region, Giuseppe Penone has been exploring materials, forms and processes inspired by nature. As early as the end of the 1960's, the sculptor shared the reflections of artists principally active between Turin and Rome, united under the banner of Arte Povera by the art critic Germano Celant. All of them worked from raw materials, from pure energies, from everyday experiences or linguistic action. Faced with the collapse of the Italian economic miracle, as with the development of a consumer society and cultural industries, the "poor art" that they created, aspired towards radical austerity, to a reduction of means down to the essential, to a nomadism outside of institutions. An assumed simplicity, which prefigures current practices, eager to project sobriety.