This monumental work, installed thanks to the collaboration of the Comune di Firenze and the generous contribution of Associazione Arte Continua, which has long been committed to supporting major public art projects, ideally introduces visitors to the exhibition “alberi In-Versi”, hosted at the Gallerie degli Uffizi from July 6 to October 3, 2021.
Since the late 1960s, Giuseppe Penone has persistently tested the possibilities of sculpture to investigate and reveal the primary form of knowledge that arises from the exchange between humans and their surroundings, in a continuous contact that produces mutual metamorphoses.
For Penone, the tree is a perfect sculpture—an archetypal image rooted in a youth spent among the woods of the Maritime Alps, and thus a subject he has explored consistently throughout more than fifty years of research. Through its concentric growth rings, the tree reveals an essential form that is fundamentally necessary to its own existence, one that changes in response to stimuli from its environment and simultaneously records and contains the memory of that very form. Firmly rooted in the earth, yet with branches reaching toward the sky. Among trees, the artist particularly favors conifers—pines, cedars, larches, and firs—for their trunks that do not undergo excessive twisting and their tiered branches that create an extremely regular structure: a formal synthesis of the very idea of a tree.
The work that the artist has chosen to place in Piazza della Signoria is precisely a monumental “Abete”, a 22-meter-tall structure whose trunk and branches were cast in stainless steel; the 18 elements, also obtained through a casting process from molds of bamboo segments, are instead made of bronze. By connecting the slender branches of the fir tree, they form an evocative lattice that gives the sculpture an ascending spiral movement.
Casting and imprinting, which form the basis of the fusion process, are constant and favored methods for Penone, as they are processes in which contact once again comes into play—an action through which different bodies and materials mutually alter each other’s form and substance.
“Abete” is the result of Giuseppe Penone’s growing interest in an expansion of his work on an environmental scale and in its application within the realm of public space, especially in urban contexts. These settings offer a ground for reflection on the relationship of absolute continuity that, according to the artist, exists between culture and nature, between the time of history and that of life, between past and present—even in a place as strongly characterized as this one.
The mission of our association is to unite, through non-profit efforts, the energy of our members with public commitment, to overcome the challenge that fear always brings through culture and knowledge, and to restore dignity to life.
“A heartfelt thank you to the artist, to the director of the Uffizi, Eike Schmidt, to the President of the Region of Tuscany, Eugenio Giani, to the Mayor, Dario Nardella, and to the Councillor for Culture, Tommaso Sacchi, to the members of Arte Continua and to the staff who made possible the prelude to the exhibition ‘Alberi In-Versi’ by Giuseppe Penone, which will open at the Uffizi on June 1st.”
Mario Cristiani, President of Associazione Arte Continua
