Sculture di linfa

Giuseppe Penone has been working with natural materials like leaves and trees since the 1960s. The environmental installation "Sculture di linfa" - Lymph sculpture - stimulates the senses of the visitor, first and foremost that of smell. The walls are covered with tanned leather, previously applied to the bark of trees so that it takes on their form. Incisions in the Carrara marble floor recall both the veining of leaves and the human brain. Set on the floor at the centre of the room is a wooden beam that conserves a flow of pine resin, the vital lymph. The artist – ever attentive to nature and its processes of development and transformation, like those of life and the human body – brings to light a lost image of the tree itself. Digging through its knots and branches it is as if he is going back in time, giving the plant a new life, that of art.