1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910554221703321

Autore

Mangini Elizabeth

Titolo

Seeing Through Closed Eyelids : Giuseppe Penone and the Nature of Sculpture

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Toronto : , : University of Toronto Press, , 2021

©2021

ISBN

1-4875-3693-3

1-4875-1134-5

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (238 pages)

Collana

Toronto Italian Studies

Classificazione

cci1icc

Disciplina

709.2

Soggetti

ART / Individual Artists / Monographs

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di contenuto

Introduction: His Being in the Twenty-Second Year of Life at a Fantastic Hour -- Presentness and Trace -- An Artist Turned Inside Out -- Radical Reciprocity: Passive Sculptor/Active Material -- Tempus Arborus (Tree Time) -- Conclusion: An Ontology of Sculpture – Form, Process, and Palimpsest

Sommario/riassunto

"Can a work of art help us know our world differently? In this first scholarly study of Giuseppe Penone, art historian Elizabeth Mangini argues that the Italian artist's engagement of the body's multiple senses constitutes a new theory of sculpture as a means to connect with and know the phenomenal world. Through close readings of signal works across Penone's five-decade career--from his emergence in the context of 1960s Arte Povera to his position as a preeminent contemporary artist today--Mangini demonstrates that Penone refuses modernist opticality, recasts artistic labour, and emphasizes a non-anthropocentric concept of time. This approach challenges viewers to broaden their sensory and temporal perceptions, creating structurally significant new ways to understand human experience. Giuseppe Penone is best known for his engagement with trees, which he employs as raw material, imagery, and an active force in the creative process. Seeing Through Closed Eyelids suggests that such works materialize the perceptible tensions between any organism and its environment. By locating Penone's art in its social context and connecting it to broader



discourses about art's status, theories of phenomenology, and the anthropocene, this book offers an original reading of Penone's work, as well as a wider view to the artistic generation for whom sculpture was a means to probe the nature of experience itself at the dawn of postmodernism."--