Pelle di Marmo e Spine d'acacia-Nora

Giuseppe Penone’s Pelle di Marmo e Spine d’acacia-Nora—an evocative diptych comprised of a slab of pink marble alongside a canvas adorned with silk and an array of delicate but sharp acacia thorns—combines the traditional with the modern. His interest in the inherent qualities of his materials references the ideology of his arte povera contemporaries, such as Giovanni Anselmo and Jannis Kounellis, yet with his use of marble this work also sings to an even larger narrative: that of Michelangelo and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and the great Italian artists who worked over half a millennium before.

Penone infuses his sharp and angular canvases with the soft ripples inherent to the surfaces found in nature such as skin, tree bark, or rock formations. In this work, the left canvas features the pink undulations of the surface of marble to create a beautiful and ponderous effect. The right canvas mimics the left as thorns, which Penone has pricked into a silk-laid canvas, run diagonally through our field of vision and repeat the aesthetic of the marble.

By his astute use of materials Penone combines the ancient and modern traditions of his home country. A central figure of the arte povera movement, he conflates history into singular moments in time. This work speaks specifically to the great legacy of the Renaissance by making marble the subject of Pelle di Marmo e Spine d’acacia-Nora. As such the work is ultimately a love-letter to the artist’s rich cultural heritage and calls to humanity with the gentle undulations that gracefully ripple throughout the work.