Gagosian features an exhibition of new works by Giuseppe Penone until 22nd December. Titled Impronte di luce / Empreintes de lumière, the show is presented at 4 rue de Ponthieu, and 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.)

Also included in the exhibition, on the gallery’s ground floor, are Svolgere la propria pelle – 10 giugno 1970 (To Unroll One’s Skin – June 10, 1970) (1970), one of Penone’s earliest works; drawings from the Maldoror series (1986–88), which was inspired by Comte de Lautréamont’s 1868–69 prose poem “Les Chants de Maldoror” and sees Penone using hand imprints to create “a changing landscape of signs”; and a large untitled drawing from 1983 that employs some of the same motifs. On the first floor are five works from the celebrated Propagazioni (Propagations) series (2012), slabs of onyx engraved with fingerprints.

An essay by Carlos Basualdo, Keith L. and Catherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, will be published to accompany the exhibition. On October 18, 2023, Penone was appointed a foreign associate member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris.