Sculpture in and out of time
Eternity or dissolution?
The sculptor Giuseppe Penone was a protagonist of what Germano Celant, in 1967, called arte povera or “poor art,” a generation of mostly Italian artists making frank, unprecious work that thumbed its nose at an increasingly rapacious marketplace. Even though Penone, at 79, has long moved on, he has never escaped the association, and it still feels off to encounter him at Gagosian, the cynosure of the art market and an arena for conspicuous cultural consumption. The Reflection of Bronze (closes today) marks Penone’s arrival at something like the opposite of where he began back in the 1960s and 1970s. Then, he would let a tree grow around metal in the shape of his silhouette or fist, and he began carving away the wood around knots in industrially milled beams to reveal a sort of arboreal skeleton. A later iteration of this series — “Albero di 3 metri (3-Meter Tree)” (1995) — hangs in The Reflection of Bronze with all the pathos of a medieval crucifix; a tear of sap sweats down from its upper reaches. But most of the sculptures at Gagosian are trompe l’oeil bronze casts of trees on which Penone has performed his trademark surgery — sculptures that resemble nature but are in fact pure artifice.
Penone’s soulful and serious if ever more spectacular work has long been growing in size, and has involved bronze in one way or another for decades, often in combination with wood. But The Reflection of Bronze has a certain Gagosian gigantism about it. Penone’s musings are stencilled onto the walls, and, after reading his statement about bronze being the “mirror of man,” you can take a look at a ping-pong-paddle-sized Egyptian bronze mirror, on loan from the Brooklyn Museum, just in case you needed to be reminded of the material’s antiquity. Though Penone’s early work was quietly radical, rejecting the mass-produced feel of Minimalism to embrace a back-to-the-earth ecology, these latest sculptures aspire to the timeless, blue-chip realm of myth. “While he is celebrated for his use of and interest in wood, bronze for him is not a more permanent, more marketable substitute for that material,” writes the show’s curator, former Whitney director Adam Weinberg, in a telling reassurance. “Rather, his use of bronze involves a profound, rich, varied, and lifelong response to enduring artistic questions.” The truth feels less either/or, more both/and. Permanence is not unrelated to what the professionals call “preservation,” and it is measured as much by markets as museums.
The show’s room-sized centerpiece, the first thing you encounter when you walk in, is indeed worthy of the ancients. “Marsia (Marsyas)” (2024) is an abstract representation of the flaying of Marsyas, a satyr who got on the wrong side of Apollo for playing the aulos, or ancient Greek oboe, with a bit too much skill, and by extension an avatar for every artist. A tall bronze cast of treebark — a kind of skin — stands vertical on a base of granite scored with semi-circular channels, equally evocative of a column’s flutes and of the bore-holes left by traditional methods of cutting stone. Against this skin, on one side, leans a bronze of two intertwined tree-trunks, stripped of their bark, in a natural finish; the taut stainless steel cable which binds them together is connected, on the other side, to an identical pair of trunks, with a haunting teal patina, which hang suspended above the granite in what feels like agony — the agony of Marsyas, of the artist, and, perhaps, of nature itself, flayed and sacrificed to man’s needs. (One shudders to consider the show’s carbon footprint.) The room’s walls are sheathed in natural cork, occasionally decorated by smaller masks fashioned from bronze-cast acacia leaves, and some other slender trunks, which hang like clubs or talismans. Penone uses all his considerable material and aesthetic resources to turn the gallery’s conventional white cube into a tomb, or a temple.
Somehow the magic dissipates in the show’s second room, where we walk into a forest of mainly bronze trees — four of them (each called “Clepsydra,” or “Water Clock,” dating from 2012 and 2024) totemic casts of Penone’s more familiar wooden sculptures. Atop a big pile of black earth in the middle of the space stands the bronze cast of a hollowed-out larch trunk, within which a living sapling grows. The conceit is obvious and, beneath the touching contrast, strained. More moving is the final work, from which the show takes its name: “The Reflection of Bronze” (2005). Penone presents a series of seven bronze rectangles about 4 by 2.5 feet cast one from the other using the lost-wax process, accumulating the marks the artist made in the wax to become progressively more obscure. The piece constitutes a poem on what lasts, and what gets lost, with permanence. Reflected in these darkening mirrors, the big bronzes that dominate the show appear as the monuments of an aging artist, eager not so much to capture the transient or, conversely, create outdoor sculptures of monumental scale (two of the ends to which Penone has used the material in the past), but to make some claim on eternity in the face of the end — not just his own, but nature’s.
Few other sculptors can afford to make grand work out of expensive materials, and I’m not sure they’d want to, anyway. You could see the giant crumbling heads and busts that Mark Manders is showing at Tanya Bonakdar (closes July 31) as variations on Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” with a skepticism of monumentality baked into their “shattered visages.” And much of the recent sculpture on display in galleries around town has been decidedly low-key. Gedi Sibony’s recent show at Greene Naftali continued his practice of making sculpture out of salvaged wood and other junk from his studio. At Reena Spaulings, Ryan Sullivan offered, among his more familiar paintings, rectangular columns made of a composite material you might call trash terrazzo — and a table piece assembled with recycled Styrofoam, wood (complete with a shipping label), and a copper wing. Most memorably, Mitchell Charbonneau, at his latest solo show at Off Paradise (closes August 7), presents immaculately produced glass sculptures of burnt-out fluorescent lightbulbs, like dead Flavins or studio trash handcrafted by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, along with wall hangings made of copper and lead treated to resemble the walls of various basements he has known. All this smaller, more self-effacing work lives in the flash-fast world of cheap commodities, asking what happens to goods when they aren’t good anymore.
Perhaps the show in most revealing contrast with Penone’s is Meg Webster’s Thicket a few blocks south at Paula Cooper (closes July 31). Webster, who is 82, is roughly Penone’s contemporary, and both began as something like post-minimalists who used nature as their primary medium. But instead of seeking permanence, Webster has typically preferred transience. “Thicket” (2026) is a large spiral hedge woven out of plant cuttings; the spiral begins at the ground and rises as it curls inward to a height of maybe seven feet or so. The leaves and flowers — which are tended and occasionally replaced by the gallery staff — exude a grassy-alfalfa smell you sense as soon as you open the street-level gallery door; you hear, too, birds chirping (a recording made at the Hutcheson Memorial Forest in New Jersey). The scent strengthens as you walk up the stairs and then into the thicket. The installation is like an organic Richard Serra: you move inward and find yourself hidden, embraced. But rather than the rusted geometry of an alien form, Webster makes something that feels like the bushes you hid under as a child. When the show is over, Webster will disassemble the piece, as is her wont. (There are other, lesser works in the show, including boxes made of musky beeswax and a slender reflective spike leaning in a corner like a narwhal tusk, that are permanent, and therefore saleable.) Webster’s aesthetic, as it first emerged roughly half a century ago, might be read as offering a feminist alternative to the more masculine strictures of the preceding generation’s Minimalism. But Webster’s delicate art of foraging, assemblage, and tracelessness — of embracing dissolution, rather than striving for bronzed eternity — now feels like the future.
This is the July installment of Max Norman’s column on contemporary art.
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