The Shock of the Vegetal
That moment is long gone, and is inexorably approaching departed lived memory. Its practitioners are either dead, such as the American land artists Robert’s Smithson and Morris, or old in the case of Richard Long, hermann de vries, David Nash or Nils Udo. The list of overwhelmingly white male land artists and sculptors continued, after their first wild years, to build respected and broad bodies of art, working from a natural materials palette, outside in the land rather than in the gallery. But what was once new and shocking is neither today. Rather it is accepted and mainstream, if occasionally provocative, and thanks to the camera and other recording technologies and despite their ephemerality, everywhere.
Season to season, the shock of the new fades into familiarity. As true to life as art, the new is a cardinal touchstone of the avant-garde and recent successors. Earth art, land art and the rise and recognition of the environment and ecological within the artworld were, once upon a time, new, another kind of shock. The newness was ironic too, a measure of our era’s industrial society’s distance from the natural world, while the shock encompassed the need for a reminder that yes, nature was still there.
In early spring I attended the press preview before returning to the exhibition again some weeks later. On first encounter, Thoughts in the Roots, the exhibition’s title seemed to speak to new tree-related research, which has been emerging through the last decades, including Suzanne Simard’sWood Wide Web, mycorrhizal fungi root systems helping trees communicate, and botanists seriously entertaining plant intelligence.
The same is true of the Italian artist,Giuseppe Penone, whose exhibition, Thoughts in the Roots is the main summer attraction at the Serpentine’s South Gallery in London’s Hyde Park. The exhibition includes sculptural and conceptual installation pieces both inside the gallery and in the immediate park grounds, alongside photographs of Penone’s twenty-three-year-old face modelling Reversing One’s Eyes, when he was just beginning to make a mark as part of Turin’s Arte Povera movement from 1970. This year, Penone turned 78. Of all those associated with Arte Povera, Italy’s well-known 1960’s radical art movement, he is the artist most associated with nature, and particularly trees.
The trees and their outgrowths are the heart of the Serpentine show. There are swirling acacia thorns, which are the imprint of the forest floor rubbed into cotton sheets and draped against a gallery wall, the cleverly lit inner-tree carving named Book Trees (2018) which stands in the Serpentine’s inner sanctum. Outside, there is the series of thunderstruck trees, one from his Alberi series, which holds river stones. He doesn’t only work with the trunks and mainstay limbs but leaves too. Leaves are, Penone said, in a short video made to accompany the exhibition, “in a sense” the outermost protective layer of trees are like a skin.
In early spring I attended the press preview before returning to the exhibition again some weeks later. On first encounter, Thoughts in the Roots, the exhibition’s title seemed to speak to new tree-related research, which has been emerging through the last decades, including Suzanne Simard’s Wood Wide Web, mycorrhizal fungi root systems helping trees communicate, and botanists seriously entertaining plant intelligence. But I was wrong. Speaking with him in a short interview, he said the title alluded to cutting things down to the essence of what’s necessary: to the roots. When I asked if he saw a connection Penone responded, in a non-committal way,
“Yes, it makes sense. But the roots are also our origin – it’s the family and roots, the place you’re born. This gives you a specific knowledge, related to your body and reality. In this sense, that is why I gave the show its title.”
Regarding his own rootedness and what he brought from the Marine Alps to London, Penone equivocated. “It is a very different place, but the reality of a tree, or nature is similar. Hyde Park is unique because it’s so clean and perfect, if you go into the wood you don’t have this reality.”
“I know that the brain of the tree is in the roots, so the ends of the roots are connected with other trees, just like a community.” I wondered if he found this new knowledge convincing, and whether he connected with it: “Does it make sense to you?” I asked.
Despite its promotional claims, Thoughts in the Roots is the briefest of introductory dips into Penone’s world and practice. But after visiting the corridor-like entrance and the three main rooms, I came away refreshed by the set-pieces on show.
The first piece is ‘A occhi chiusi (With Eyes Closed)’ (2018.) Comprised of a 1001 tiny acacia thorns mounted on Carrara marble the thorns evoke impressionistic whirling wind vortices. Complexity and chaos feel like obvious shout-outs, as does Land art – specifically, Chris Drury’s hand-written lists of the winds from Antarctica. But unlike Drury there isn’t the link to contemporary chaos or complexity sciences. One instance of Land art and Arte Povera’s overlaps and differences, more broadly Thoughts in the Roots offers suggestive food for thought regarding the links or otherwise between Penone’s Mediterranean Arte Povera inflected work, the Land art tribes of Drury, David Nash and others, and the wider ecological art world.
Leading visitors into the second room space, and trailing several wall faces, a free-flowing, long textile scroll displays a river of words, running horizontally along the wall. At its centre is the imprint of a tree trunk. Turn around, and across the room is a collection of ochre casket pots filled with carefully raked soil, and Vegetal Gestures flow out of earthy pots. Out of each are two rhythmic bodies entwined in trees: one standing, the other reclining, positing the human into the more-than-human. At present, there is also cotton hanging from the opposite wall. Forest Green’s (Verde del bosco) ghost rubbings onto the hanging cotton from the forest’s wooded interiors date back to 1986, the cloaked surfaces recording the imprint of the brush and foliage.
Leading visitors into the second room space, and trailing several wall faces, a free-flowing, long textile scroll displays a river of words, running horizontally along the wall. At its centre is the imprint of a tree trunk. Turn around, and across the room is a collection of ochre casket pots filled with carefully raked soil, and Vegetal Gestures flow out of earthy pots. Out of each are two rhythmic bodies entwined in trees: one standing, the other reclining, positing the human into the more-than-human. At present, there is also cotton hanging from the opposite wall. Forest Green’s (Verde del bosco) ghost rubbings onto the hanging cotton from the forest’s wooded interiors date back to 1986, the cloaked surfaces recording the imprint of the brush and foliage.
The centrepiece of the exhibition are two conjoined pieces symbolically placed within the Serpentine’s central bell tower –Alberi libro (Book Trees), (2017) and an older piece Respirare l’ombra (To Breathe the Shadow) (1999). I tried but failed to smell the laurel leaves, but was told it was very strong by another visitor with a more sensitive nose. It was packed onto the wall in a netted grid, the organisational structure hinting at a modernist past. By inhaling the aroma of the laurel leaves, Penone was, he suggested, attempting to recreate the outside inside – another instance of the reversals leitmotif.
Originally shown at the Palais des Papes in Avignon in France, 2000, To Breathe the Shadow adds another accretive layer to earlier breath based-work, the Soffi (Breaths) series. These were investigations into the shared inhalation and exhalation of the vegetable and animal. “Leaves are the part of a tree which are connected to the tree’s breath,” he says in the Serpentine video. The shadow leaves create protection for the tree, and then the visitor can breathe in this shadow. Tree’s breath, their inhaling and exhaling, he continued, walking an anthropomorphising tightrope, reverses the human effect of creating carbon out of oxygen, instead turning carbon into oxygen, while acting as a tree’s protective skin..
Counterpoint to this dark grove-like four walled interior is the carved Alberi libro. The vertical undulations of the trunks provide a physical example of the tree’s inner world and life into outward-facing sculptural presence. Dependent on careful and restrained lighting to draw out the grain’s physical properties and splendour, the carving reflects years of working backwards, again a key stratagem of Penone’s practice.
Once again, the line between human and vegetal presents itself, with Penone cutting into tree trunks in search of its original form. Sounding not entirely unlike Goethe’s ur-pflanze, by carving away at the tree’s barky outer being, he renders re-visible the original plant, and cellulose forest deep inside the tree’s limbs.
Overall, the laurel green of the room invoked a peaceful ambience. But despite this vegetal stature, in a room of a neo-classical building lined with a matching green marble floor, it was hard to fully escape the tree’s imperial Roman associations, the laurel wreath a central symbol for martial victory. As counterpoint, the room’s peaceful ambience brought on dreams that kindred leaf walls might also be found in public spaces in the wider world – a stark contrast to the well-defined sanctified art-walls of the Serpentine.
The other side of the wall, in the third gallery room, a version of the older Breath of Leaves is also present, as is Presione (Pressure), a supersized imprint of his skin projected onto the inside wall which Penone went on to trace in graphite, another reminder pervading Thoughts in the Roots, of the human and its boundaries.
Throughout the exhibition, Penone brought the outside in. There was also the particular parkland outside, joined by three imported outsides a stone’s throw from the gallery; three dead trees, artificially preserved and unnatural, near the Serpentine’s stretch of Hyde Park. They are three of the artworks: Albero Folgorato (Thunderstruck Tree) (2012), and two works from his Ideas of Stone series: Idee di pietra – Ciliegio (Ideas of Stone – Cherry Tree) and Idee di pietra – 1891kg di luce (Ideas of Stone – 1891kg of Light) (2010). The pencil-thin willow was struck in Belgium before being reconstituted into its broken bones, mixing original tree with cast bronze. The two Ideas of Stone tree sculptures are made of bronze, while the stones, smoothed by a river’s flow are balanced on their branches, their gravitational weight pulling them back to the earth. All the while, they elongate towards the sky. At the press opening Penone noted how, “the stone marks the force of gravity and the force of the light and the force of life they are contraposed.”
“The symbology of it can suggest different things,” he continued. One idea I like is that it connects the energy of the light, which forms like branches to the tree to the roots where they go, so there is a similar form, though a different energy and light. There’s a kind of unity that appears in the form of what we are and what surrounds us.”
Once again, Penone is playing with nature and its different forces, the vegetal world seeking the light just as gravity’s force field pulls the stone earthbound. Yet, whatever Penone’s or the Serpentine curatorial teams’ hopes, it remains a challenge to feel immersed in nature amidst Hyde Park’s manicured lawns and thrum of London traffic.
Overall, though wrapped around the tree in its entirety, its symbolism for humans, and its inner and outer realms, Penone works with a supporting cast of materials, particularly metals, including bronze, and gold. There is stone, earths, and other vegetal plants: potatoes and pumpkins are a part of the Soffio series as though appendages, but not the main event.
Where, though, did this lifeline of tree work originate?
Penone was born and grew up in Garessio municipality – reputedly one of the most beautiful villages in Italy – in the Ligurian Alps, 100 miles south-west of Turin. Close but separate from the larger Maritime Alps, oaks and pine predominate in the terrain of mixed forests. It’s easy to imagine the young child forming a love of the forested mountain land, and later picking up on new ecological sensibilities. Nor is it complicated to interpret the ecological philosophy of the senses that Penone has elaborated and expanded on through, as a result of growing up in Garessio.
For the To turn one’s eyes inside out performance piece at Galleria Gian Enzo Sperone, Penone wore contact-lens like mirrors, revealing whatever was reflected for the onlooker, while removing Penone from the world of sight. The show solidified his place among Turin’s Arte Povera contemporaries, a network including Mario Merz, Giovanni Anselmo, and Michelangelo Pistoletto. The name came from the late art critic Germano Celant a year earlier, with the publication of his Arte Povera, announcing a new movement with a survey of Italian, integrating a broader selection of European and North American artists. Alongside Joseph Beuys, Smithson and Morris, there were six works by a 22 year old called Giuseppe Penone.
Valorda village in the Garresio valley N.Longo/CC BY-SA 4.0.. 
Mario Merz’s Igloo series in the KMM Sculpturee park, the Netherlands – photo Gerardus/Public Domain
Though others used a similar material vocabulary across their works, Mario Merz filled his Igloo de Giap series with a supporting cast of poor materials: earth, stone, twigs, canvas, wax and wire mesh. No other Arte Povera artist embraced the relationship with nature so whole-heartedly as Penone. To turn one’s eyes inside out was an early instance of foregrounding the body and its inhabitation. Skin smell, and touch, rather than the omnipresence of vision, called for a broadening of the sensuality of the body and our boundaries with the world beyond were starting places: In the late 1960s this was of the moment and revolutionary.
The trees were just the beginning. During the 1967-1968 winter, Penone would hike up into forests close to Garessio, and began playing with trees. Braiding the stems of three young ashes together, he redirected their growth and shape. Messing with the streams and watercourses, he interrupted their life-giving flow, feeding the soil nutrients and sap that every tree needs to survive. He bear-hugged an alder before etching his body’s outline on the trunk with iron wiring, and then a metal cast. Where the cast is, the tree stops growing.
The title Alpi Marittime, Maritime Alps (1968) how trees rely on larger ecological systems of tributaries flowing down towards lower land and into the Mediterranean Sea. Also, part of this earliest series, if more widely familiar, is Continuerà a crescere tranne che in quel punto (It Will Continue to Grow Except at That Point). Penone cut into another young sapling and attached a bronze cast of his hand, where it inhibited the tree’s upward thrust towards the light and sun, becoming one of Penone’s most recognisable signature pieces.
Initially, the piece was only known through photographic documentation and hand drawings. Penone later expanded on this protean illustration of culture stemming from nature’s own volition and biological desire throughout decades of practice.
Image 1. Penone working on one of the Alpi Marittime, Maritime Alps action pieces in 1970 – photo Archivo Penone. Image 2. Giuseppe Penone, Alpi Marittime – Continuerà a crescere tranne che in quel punto (Maritime Alps – It Will Continue to Grow except at That Point), 1968–2003 – foto Archivo Penone. Image 3. Ripetere il bosco (To Repeat the Forest), 1969-1997 – photo Archivo Penone
The same year, 1969, Penone carved his first tree sculpture, Albero. Working from the outside in, he drew back the years on a long man-made beam, uncovering the tree’s inner growth patterns and annual growth rings. As the years chiselled, gouged and cut away, time revealed and rendered visible the knots growing out from the core trunk.
“Trees are always beautiful”, Penone says in the Serpentine video, and trees present inherent and primaeval sculptural qualities, particularly their sculptural form, and how they adhere to an enticing natural logic. Every part of the tree down to the smallest twig is biologically needed, to help it prosper and grow. Also, in the video, Penone alludes to how the core of his eco-philosophy is expressed in the word ‘fluidity.’ Water and air, he says, are fast moving and fluid states, whereas human bodies are slower.
What doesn’t come across, though, was a sense that this is a biological philosophy. Darwin’s brutal evolutionary dictum, the idea that nature is “red in claw and tooth” is entirely absent. The tree, the wood and the forest may be alive, but there isn’t a sense of human beings’ role in any greater ecological entity, be it Gaia, Earth Systems Science, or the aforementioned recent outcrops of tree intelligence, or the Internet. Nor does he make a connection to the ‘more than human’ world, either. Born two years after the end of World War II, Penone strikes me as a figure growing up in when enlightenment thinking and values still prevailed. His immersion in the sensuousness of the world placed him way ahead of many, providing the roots from which his nature/culture experiments have grown. But they are out of kilter with the current moment, and today’s post-enlightenment times. This isn’t surprising, Italy was undergoing political and revolutionary turmoil in the early seventies, one reason for Arte Povera’s agenda. But despite the movement’s relatively short shelf life from 1968 to 1973, interest has continued in new generations. When asked about comparisons between that revolutionary time and today he says: “It was a moment after the war, all was changing – the possibility of travel for example. You could suddenly travel everywhere, so the big world became small.” “
The idea of the global village was very easy to understand, because it wasn’t from a specific culture. I use nature that can be shared with anyone. This was one character of that time. Now there have been very big changes – an artist from seventy or eighty years ago can’t understand the reality we are living now.”
Throughout the noughties into the 2010s, with younger artist generations rediscovering the Italian movement, Arte Povera came back into fashion. By 2014, Arte Povera pieces were trading places at up to the £20 million mark. As a significant beneficiary of the Arte Povera revival, it helped to bring Penone to the Serpentine.
Thoughts in the Roots is publicised as the most extensive ‘institutional’ overview of Penone’s work in London to date, after a decade and a half of growing UK presence for the Italian artist. His first major retrospective at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery was in 2009, which was followed by a 12-metre installation of a bronze cast tree at London’s Whitechapel in 2013. Five years later there was major retrospective at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, in 2018. Throughout this period, he was in and out of the Serpentine, participating in their 2011 Garden Marathon and working with their in-house Ecologies at Serpentine programme. The connection came fromHans Ulrich Obrist, who’s long-term relationship with the artist first began when visiting Penone as an art besotted teenage uber-fanboy in the 1980s.
Penone is an example of what became of Arte Povera. Penone is managed by the billionaire’s gallery, the Gagosian, supported by scions of the financial world, such as GoldmanSachs and Bloomberg, who hover at the bottom page sponsors shout-out.
While not detracting, how and why Penone has found a perch at the Serpentine – and others haven’t – is up for debate. For some it remains surprising that none of the Land Artists have made it to the Serpentine.
Through the windows, one could see Marina Tabassum’s summer Pavilion. A slender gingko tree rose from the ground of the translucent pavilion façade. Though an entirely different sensibility, it was clear that the Serpentine’s programming in 2025 had been designed to tick a particular environmental box. The Penone exhibition felt like a journey through time, reminding us that the threads and thickets of nature are still enwrapped in cultures. Thoughts in the Roots provided a measure of how much has changed since the 1970s, but also how much hadn’t, as one strand of ecological art sitting in the present. The shock of the vegetal is an old story. It had brought on a revolution and everything had changed. And there again, nothing was changed. ol
Further
Giuseppe Penone interview at the Serpentine here. (link to video)
Thoughts in the Roots was at the Serpentine from April through to September 2025