Friday 8th June – Arsenale: Italian Pavilion – Giuseppe Penone – Lymph Sculptures. The new Italian Pavilion reopens after eight years of absence with two very different artists, yet their basic purpose is the same: to create forms of art that are valid as a critical understanding of existence, of all that forms part of our experience. Curator Ida Gianelli explains her choice “Giusppe Penone has forty years’ work behind him, with extensive experience of the avant-garde, first in the Arte Povera movement and then while following out his own individual paths. Vezzoli is a thirty-five-year-old artist who has rapidly won an international reputation without leaving his country to live elsewhere.
Giuseppe Penone’s Lymph Sculptures is an installation developed for this venue, consisting of very large wood and marble sculptures as well as drawings. Penone describes it thus: “Spaces covered by hands, spaces emptied by hands. The sculpture space is filled with lymph. The hand flux flows on the tree rind, revealing the form of wood and the veins of marble.”