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Lot Essay
For Giuseppe Penone, man, art, nature and culture are all inseparably interlinked.'Nature, the European landscape that surrounds us, is artifice, is made by man' Penone insists 'it is a cultural landscape. The action of man has modified pre-existing nature creating from it a new product of his action, of his art. The most immediate cultural value of a human work often lies in its recognizability. One tends to separate the action of man from nature as if man were not taking part in it. I wanted to fossilize one of the gestures that culture has produced.' (Giuseppe Penone, cited in Arte povera in collezione, exh. cat., Turin, 2000, p. 236)
Rooted in this fundamental connection between man, culture and nature, Penone recognized that 'one of the problems of sculpture is contact, the idea by itself is not enough, it doesn't work; an action is necessary and this action is transmitted through contact.' (interview with William Furlong, in Mel Gooding and William Furlong, Song of the Earth: European Artists and the Landscape, London, 2002, p. 150.) Towards this end, much of Penone's art is concerned with the making and marking of a gestural contact between man and nature.
Biforcazione (Bifurcation) is an important sculpture in this tradition that anticipates a series of similar works on this theme known as the Gesto Vegetale - (plant gesture) - bronze sculptures that mimetically explore the similarity between human and vegetal form. Bifurcation, a term widely used in mathematics, literally means a forking or branching out, and refers to that point at which an entity such as a river, tree or body, splits itself into two. It is this point on a tree that Penone interacts with in this work, marking it with a bronze (for him a kind of fossilized as well as sculptural) record of a human gesture. Using the (bifurcated) spread of the fingers of his own hands on clay to claw a bifurcated form that mimics the flow of a river and the bark of a tree, Penone has subsequently 'fossilized' a human bodily gesture into a form that both embraces and joins with the tree at the very point where it itself splits into two. Biforcazione is in this respect a kind of reversal of Penone's Alberi (Trees) - the hollowed-out carvings in which the artist, 'discovered' the form of a tree hidden within a wooden block. In these 'flayed trees', Penone himself was the living element of motion interacting with the natural forms of the tree while it itself remained static. In Biforcazione this motion on the part of the artist has become fossilized and static while the similarly truncated but living form of the tree grows and moves through it.
Rooted in this fundamental connection between man, culture and nature, Penone recognized that 'one of the problems of sculpture is contact, the idea by itself is not enough, it doesn't work; an action is necessary and this action is transmitted through contact.' (interview with William Furlong, in Mel Gooding and William Furlong, Song of the Earth: European Artists and the Landscape, London, 2002, p. 150.) Towards this end, much of Penone's art is concerned with the making and marking of a gestural contact between man and nature.
Biforcazione (Bifurcation) is an important sculpture in this tradition that anticipates a series of similar works on this theme known as the Gesto Vegetale - (plant gesture) - bronze sculptures that mimetically explore the similarity between human and vegetal form. Bifurcation, a term widely used in mathematics, literally means a forking or branching out, and refers to that point at which an entity such as a river, tree or body, splits itself into two. It is this point on a tree that Penone interacts with in this work, marking it with a bronze (for him a kind of fossilized as well as sculptural) record of a human gesture. Using the (bifurcated) spread of the fingers of his own hands on clay to claw a bifurcated form that mimics the flow of a river and the bark of a tree, Penone has subsequently 'fossilized' a human bodily gesture into a form that both embraces and joins with the tree at the very point where it itself splits into two. Biforcazione is in this respect a kind of reversal of Penone's Alberi (Trees) - the hollowed-out carvings in which the artist, 'discovered' the form of a tree hidden within a wooden block. In these 'flayed trees', Penone himself was the living element of motion interacting with the natural forms of the tree while it itself remained static. In Biforcazione this motion on the part of the artist has become fossilized and static while the similarly truncated but living form of the tree grows and moves through it.