Gagosian Paris to exhibit New Body of Work by Giuseppe Penone - Impronte di luce / Empreintes de lumière. Opens on October 17, coinciding with Paris+ par Art Basel

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The imprint reveals the golden ratio that I have in my hands. With my eyes closed, my skin's points of contact are endless. The hand touching the surface casts a shadow that turns into light when it is retracted and the color appears.
—Giuseppe Penone

Gagosian is pleased to announce Giuseppe Penone's Impronte di luce / Empreintes de lumière. Opening on October 16 at 4 rue de

Ponthieu, the exhibition centers on an entirely new body of paintings, unique in the artist's more than fifty-year career. Inspired by Penone's experience of Le Corbusier's Couvent Sainte-Marie de La Tourette in Éveux, France, these canvases are on view alongside imprints used in their production; an artist's book, Le Bois Sacré du Couvent de La Tourette (2022), which collects rubbings made from the building's wood-grained concrete walls; and other graphic and sculptural works.

Penone's complex and extended relationship with the convent—he has visited it repeatedly and exhibited there in 2022—sparked a dialogue that led to these new paintings. Working with paint—a medium to which he is a relative stranger—and making use of Le Corbusier's sixty-three-color palette for "architectural polychromy," the artist has again employed a process of imprinting and tracing. First stamping sections of his hands in ink on paper to generate shapes that suggest animal or human figures, he then projected the designs onto canvases, reproducing them at a larger scale in oil paint.

Throughout his career, Penone, a protagonist of #arte Povera, has wielded a broad range of materials and forms to explore growth, respiration, and other involuntary processes. Hands and skin have long been important motifs in his practice, linked inextricably to the manipulation of artistic materials. The fine dermal lines visible in the paintings are, like tree rings, indicators of age; their delicate textures also speak to the sense of touch as a means of experiencing and knowing the world. The dimensions of Penone's paintings—each is a 183 cm square—mirror those of Le Corbusier's Modulor, an anthropometric scale based on the golden ratio. (The series also recalls Yves Klein's Anthropométries [1960] in its direct transference of pigment from human body to painterly support.)

Further information in the press release to download