The Monumental Vision of Giuseppe Penone at the Serpentine: “Thoughts in the Roots”

Inside the Serpentine South Gallery, a square room glows with quiet. The air is thick not with silence, but with the muffled rustle of boxwood and laurel leaves—a mass of green and gold spread across the floor and walls in soft undulations. The installation Respirare l’ombra (To Breathe the Shadow) envelops the visitor in scent and texture. Laurel, once sacred to Apollo, emanates a perfume that fades with time. So too does the memory of breath, gently cast into the leaves. “The leaves absorb sound,” Giuseppe Penone explains. “So it gives you a different feeling.”

This interplay of breath, body, and ephemerality opens “Thoughts in the Roots,” the most comprehensive institutional exhibition of Penone’s work ever staged in the UK. On view at Serpentine South through September 7, 2025, and extending into the Royal Parks, the exhibition is co-curated by Claude Adjil, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Alexa Chow. It offers a rich survey of Penone’s five-decade career—from early Arte Povera actions to monumental bronzes and sensorial installations.

The Roots of One of the Most Significant Voices Within Arte Povera

Penone is internationally recognised as one of the most significant and poetic voices within Arte Povera, the radical Italian movement of the 1960s and ’70s that championed organic materials, simplicity of gesture, and a visceral reconnection with the natural world. Alongside peers such as Jannis Kounellis, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Mario Merz, Penone helped reshape contemporary sculpture by focusing on elemental processes—growth, decay, erosion—and the inseparability of human and vegetal time.

Born in 1947 in Garessio, a town nestled in the Maritime Alps, Penone emerged from a landscape where myth and material coalesced. The Tanaro River, carved through snowmelt and granite, bisects Garessio on its path northward. Federico Campagna describes it as a place “somewhat outside the confines of anthropized Modernity,” where the name itself evokes wildness and movement. For Penone, the forest was not a backdrop but a cradle. Trees, rivers, and rock strata were not objects to be depicted but beings to converse with. 

“To create the sculpture,” Penone writes in The Ritual of Gathered Air, “the sculptor must allow themselves to descend to the ground, lowering their body slowly, without haste… until they reach a state of being fully horizontal.” Sculpture, here, is not formed through force but through immersion. Stillness is not absence; it is action refined.

“The sculptor must allow themselves to descend to the ground,”

Giuseppe Penone

This ethos first surfaced in 1969, when Penone experienced an epiphany. “I bought a beam and tried carving into it to reveal the inner structure—the tree hidden inside,” he recalled to Obrist. “It worked. My idea is to reveal the forest inside the wood—to make visible something that’s always been there.”

His Alberi (Trees) series soon followed, with Penone patiently removing growth rings from timber to uncover the young sapling within. This was sculpture as unearthing, a poetics of exposure rather than imposition. In Alberi libro (Book Trees), twelve carved saplings stand like open volumes. “Every word for tree,” he wrote, “collects days of rain, sun, mist… They are words that fill the woods with their presence.”

Giuseppe Penone’s Poetic Re-Narration of the World

Though he studied and worked in Turin—then the industrial heart of Italy—Penone’s vision never strayed far from Garessio’s forests. Campagna likens him to Marcovaldo, Italo Calvino’s melancholy dreamer who sought traces of nature amid the city’s concrete and smog. Both figures enact what Campagna calls mythopoiesis—the poetic re-narration of the world, not as invention, but as revelation.

During his years in Turin, Penone was surrounded by the hum of transformation: Fiat factories, metalwork, protests, and the grey fog of industry. And yet, he uncovered a different order hidden beneath. He perceived the slow, silent architectures of the vegetal world interlaced with human labor, echoing ancient Hermetic principles and modern ecological insights alike. His work invites us to glimpse, in the swirling descent of a leaf, the same spiral that shapes galaxies and screws.

Monumental Sculptures Unfold Outside Serpentine South

That myth-making continues in the monumental sculptures installed outside Serpentine South. Albero folgorato (Thunderstruck Tree, 2012) captures a willow struck by lightning, its ruptures lined with gold. “The form of lightning mimics the branches of a tree,” Penone says. “There’s a kind of unity in that similarity—a pattern that links different forms of energy and life.”

Nearby, two works from the Idee di pietra (Ideas of Stone) series—1891 kg di luce and Ciliegio—depict bronze trees cradling immense river stones in their forks. “Bronze is mimetic,” he notes. “It takes on the colors of its environment: green, yellow, brown. It can resemble wood or stone. But more importantly, trees themselves are perfect sculptures.”

“Trees themselves are perfect sculptures,”

Giuseppe Penone

This intimacy with matter pervades the entire show. In Soffio di foglie (Breath of Leaves), Penone breathes into a bed of boxwood, the force of his exhale leaving a hollow—a transient imprint of presence. In his essay, he recounts the origins of the piece: gathering sacks of leaves from villagers in Bossea, scattering them across the floor of his studio, and lying down in them. “My breath gently dispersed the leaves near my mouth and nostrils… It took the shape of my breath, resembling a large leaf.”

Penone’s description of this moment reads like a liturgy: “At that point, they focus all their attention and effort on their body, pressed firmly against the earth, allowing them to perceive and feel directly all things of the earth.” His sculptures are not meant to resist time, but to reveal its passage, its respiration, its loss.

In “Thoughts in the Roots,” the Vegetal World is a Living Structure 

Throughout the exhibition, the vegetal world is not symbol but structure. In Gesti vegetali (Vegetal Gestures), bronze limbs emerge from clay pots, echoing the motion of trees. These figures, positioned just outside the gallery’s windows, lean into dialogue with the real trees beyond the glass—living counterparts to their cast bronze echoes. In his frottages, tree bark is transferred to canvas using leaves and chlorophyll—images drawn with breath and pigment, fixed through friction and touch.

The exhibition begins with A occhi chiusi (With Eyes Closed), which recalls Penone’s 1970 performance Rovesciare i propri occhi (Reversing One’s Eyes). Wearing mirrored contact lenses that rendered him blind, he confronted viewers with their own gaze. “With the absence of vision,” he said, “I create a space for imagination within the mind.” The mirror becomes not a surface but a portal. The eye, reversed, becomes a site of inner seeing.

 “With the absence of vision, I create a space for imagination within the mind,”

Giuseppe Penone

At Serpentine, this inward turn becomes architectural. The gallery is not merely a container for artworks; it is itself transformed—becoming a vessel of scent, of silence, of vegetal memory. The atmosphere is choreographed as carefully as the forms. In one moment, the pungent laurel leaf aroma recalls ritual purification. In another, the soft crackle of leaves underfoot recalls the forest floor.

One emerges from “Thoughts in the Roots” with a heightened awareness of material and metaphor. Penone does not oppose the artificial to the natural. Instead, he reveals their common ancestry. The rusted iron of a railing, the spiral of a vine, the thread of breath rising in cold air—all belong to the same continuous vocabulary.

His vision extends to a yet-unrealized dream: a park shaped like a tree. “I imagined a park laid out like the form of a tree, with paths branching like limbs,” he told Obrist. “Artworks would be placed at the ends, like fruit… It would connect our bodies, our humanity, with a pattern that’s often overlooked in the land around us.”

This dream is more than metaphor. It reflects Penone’s belief that form is not only physical—it is relational. That sculpture does not begin in the hand but in the breath, in the footfall, in the ripple left by movement across time.

Atelier Dyakova’s Publication Accompanies the Evolving Exhibition at Serpentine

A publication designed by Atelier Dyakova accompanies the exhibition, featuring new writings by Penone and contributions from Federico Campagna, Ludovico Einaudi, Precious Okoyomon, and Elif Shafak, as well as a long-form interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist. A limited-edition print marks the exhibition’s opening.

Campagna reminds us that Garessio, though small, holds histories of struggle and resistance. Partisans once descended from those same mountains to confront fascist forces. The forest, in this sense, was not only refuge—it was strategy, survival, renewal. Perhaps Penone’s sculptures carry that legacy too. Their quietness is not retreat, but resolve.

“Thoughts in the Roots” is a show that grows. It does not demand spectacle, but extends an invitation. It asks not for your attention, but for your attunement. You must move slowly. You must listen. You must breathe.

Giuseppe Penone does not ask us to look at nature. He invites us to lie down among its leaves, to descend into stillness, and to perceive the form already waiting there—in breath, in bark, in light.