Giuseppe Penone: The Imprint of Drawing

In his first New York solo museum exhibition, The Drawing Center presented Italian artist Giuseppe Penone (born 1947), who was first recognized for his work associated with Italy's Arte Povera movement in the 1960s. Curated by Catherine de Zegher, Director of The Drawing Center, the exhibition focused on Penone's impressive contributions to drawing over his career, and featured large-scale drawings and a selection of sketches executed between 1968 and 2003. Penone, and other artists associated with Arte Povera, were innovators in elucidating connections between art and everyday experience. From the 1970s to the present, Penone's work has taken its inspiration from nature and from the forms and surfaces of the human body.

The Drawing Center's exhibition was also the first presentation of Penone's series The Imprint of Drawing, 2002, featuring ten large, intricate drawings of his fingerprints. The artist conceived of the presentation of these works in relation to the architecture of The Drawing Center's main gallery, the installation following both the symmetry of the body and that of the gallery. As the gallery was divided in half by a row of columns down the middle, the drawings of the left-hand fingerprints were presented on the left side of the columns as the viewer entered, and those of the right hand on the right. Together, the drawings suggested fingers spreading out onto the gallery walls.

The centerpiece of the exhibition was the 48-foot drawing Eyelid (Palpebra), 1989, in which Penone magnified the shape and texture of his eyelid onto ten separate almond-shaped sheets. Arranged on the wall, the veined sheets suggesteda pattern of leaves and created a dialogue between the body and nature. Also featured in the exhibition was Acacia Thorns (Forehead), Spine d'Acacia (Fronte), 2002, based on an imprint of the artist's forehead, in which Penone had recreated the lines of his forehead through a patterning of acacia thorns. Penone's ambitious yet understated drawings enlarged the delicate sensory surfaces of the artist's eyelids and fingerprints to landscape-like proportions, reflecting upon the body's relationship to physical space.