Giuseppe Penone’s Thoughts in the Roots Turns a 1934 Tea Pavilion Into a Case Study in What Gets Remembered

ART & CULTURE · LONDON

Reading time: 7 min

Giuseppe Penone’s largest London exhibition to date, Thoughts in the Roots, ran at Serpentine South from 3 April to 7 September 2025, spilling out from the gallery into Kensington Gardens. Every work in it, however different the material, restates a single claim the artist first proved on a living tree in 1968: nothing pressed into something growing is ever really erased.

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In December 1968, in a forest in the Maritime Alps near his home in Piedmont, a 21-year-old Giuseppe Penone drove nails into a young tree trunk to mark the outline of his own hand, then fixed twenty-two pieces of lead, one for each year of his age, to the bark, wired together with zinc and copper. He did not carve the tree. He constrained it, at a single point, and let it keep growing everywhere else. Fifty-seven years later, that same claim, that a living thing carries forward whatever is pressed into it while it is growing, was the argument running underneath every work in Thoughts in the Roots, the most comprehensive institutional exhibition of Penone’s work ever staged in London. It opened at Serpentine South on 3 April 2025 and ran until 7 September, extending beyond the gallery’s walls into the surrounding Kensington Gardens.

Giuseppe Penone, Albero folgorato (Thunderstruck Tree), 2012. Bronze and gold. ©Photo: George Darrell. Courtesy Giuseppe Penone and Serpentine.

The gesture that started everything

The Maritime Alps interventions of 1968, made when Penone was still a young artist working outside any gallery system, are the clearest statement of what would remain his central idea for the next six decades. Alongside the marked and weighted trunk, he interlaced the stems of three young saplings together in a single work, placed a net weighted with plants over the crown of another tree so that its later growth would have to push against the net’s shape, and pressed his own body against a trunk, marking the points of contact with barbed wire. In every case, the tree was left alive and growing. The record of Penone’s intervention was not applied to the tree’s surface, the way paint or varnish sits on wood. It became part of the tree’s structure, absorbed into new growth the way a scar is absorbed into skin, visible for as long as the tree lives.

That is the idea Thoughts in the Roots asked visitors to carry into every subsequent room and every sculpture in the park outside. Penone, a founding figure of the Arte Povera movement that emerged in Italy in the late 1960s, has spent the decades since working across bronze, marble, wax, terracotta, iron and plaster, but the underlying logic has not changed. Contact leaves a permanent trace in anything capable of growth, and sculpture’s job, in his practice, is to make that trace visible rather than to impose a new form from outside.

Giuseppe Penone working on Pressione (Pressure) at Musée de Grenoble, 2014 Photo © Musée de Grenoble / ph. Jean-Luc Lacroix

What was inside Serpentine South

Indoors, the exhibition’s centrepiece was Respirare l’ombra, To Breathe the Shadow, an immersive installation built from laurel leaves that visibly fade and dry over the course of the exhibition’s run, meaning the work itself ages and changes texture and colour between April and September in ways no photograph taken on the opening day fully captures. A clay mask sits within the installation, with a bronze branch extending from it, so the piece asks a visitor’s own breath and movement through the room to keep disturbing a material that is already slowly disintegrating on its own. Nearby, Alberi libro, Book Trees, presented twelve carved saplings whose surfaces had been cut away to expose the tree’s own growth rings, working backwards through each trunk’s structure to reveal, layer by layer, the years the tree had already lived before Penone touched it, effectively unpicking each trunk to show the book of its own growth folded up inside the wood. Soffio di foglie, Breath of Leaves, extended the same logic into a different register, working with the accumulated mass of leaves rather than the single trunk, building a form entirely from something that would otherwise be swept up as waste each autumn. Together, the indoor works treated the gallery less as a display case and more as a second forest, one where growth had been arrested at the point of exhibition rather than left to continue.

What was sent out into the park

The exhibition’s most ambitious decision was to let it leave the building entirely. Kensington Gardens, centuries older than the Serpentine’s own galleries, became a second exhibition space for a run of outdoor bronzes, extending the show well beyond the footprint any single gallery could offer and putting the work in direct, daily competition with the weather, the park’s visitors and the park’s own trees. Albero folgorato, Thunderstruck Tree, cast a hundred-year-old Belgian willow in bronze, with its wounds picked out in gold leaf, a single tree’s storm damage rendered permanent and valuable rather than concealed, treating a scar most landowners would fell and remove as the most important feature of the whole trunk. The Idee di pietra series, Ideas of Stone, placed two further works among the park’s own living trees: Ciliegio and 1891 kg di Luce, both continuing a method Penone has returned to across his career, bronze-cast tree forms balancing an actual boulder in their branches, the boulder’s weight standing in for the physical pressure of an idea held in the mind, and the number in the title of 1891 kg di Luce naming the exact weight of the stone the bronze branches are shown holding. Placed among the park’s real, living trees rather than isolated on a plinth, the bronzes read less as sculptures set down in a landscape and more as a second, permanent forest quietly arguing with the seasonal one around it.

Giuseppe Penone working on Pressione (Pressure) at Musée de Grenoble, 2014 Photo © Musée de Grenoble / ph. Jean-Luc Lacroix

Fifty-seven years of one idea, worked in a dozen materials

Penone was born in 1947 in Garessio, a small town in Piedmont, and still works between Turin and Paris. He first exhibited in Turin in the late 1960s, and his 1969 solo show at the Sperone gallery, alongside the critic Germano Celant’s writing that same year, placed him at the centre of what became known internationally as Arte Povera, a generation of Italian artists working with raw and organic materials against the polish of Pop and Minimalism elsewhere in the West. His first major public collection acquisition came in 1970, when Stockholm’s Moderna Museet bought Albero di 12 metri, a twelve-metre tree work. He showed at Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972, and by 2007 had completed the Giardino delle sculture fluide, the Garden of Fluid Sculptures, at the Venaria Palace outside Turin, a full landscape commission rather than a single object. Across nearly six decades, his stated position, that human identity and natural process are continuous rather than opposed, has remained constant even as the materials carrying it have multiplied: bronze, marble, wood, wax, plaster, terracotta and crystal all appear across his output, each chosen for how precisely it can register contact, pressure or growth.

A tea pavilion showing an artist obsessed with permanence

Serpentine South is not a neutral white cube. The building was constructed in 1934 by the architect J. Grey West as a park tea room, replacing an earlier refreshment building on the same spot that dated to 1855, and it only became an art gallery in 1970, the same year Penone’s tree work entered a Stockholm museum for the first time. For its first three years as a gallery it had no central heating and opened only through the summer months, closer in spirit to the seasonal building it had originally been than to the year-round institution it later became. Its sibling building, Serpentine North, opened only in 2013, built into a nineteenth-century former gunpowder store with a Zaha Hadid extension housing the restaurant and shop, a structure whose own history runs from military storage to hospitality in under two centuries. Putting Penone’s work, an entire practice built on the idea that a building or a living thing carries its history forward physically rather than shedding it, inside a converted 1934 tea pavilion and a former explosives store is a coincidence of scheduling rather than a curatorial pun, but it is a fitting one. Both buildings are, in their own way, proof of Penone’s central claim: nothing that has been a tea room or a gunpowder store stops being shaped by having been one, whatever it becomes afterwards.

Giuseppe Penone, Alberi libro (Book Trees), 2017 and Respirare l’ombra (To Breathe the Shadow), 2000, installation view, Serpentine South. ©Photo: George Darrell. Courtesy Giuseppe Penone and Serpentine.

Final thoughts

Thoughts in the Roots worked at two very different scales at once: the intimacy of Respirare l’ombra’s slowly drying leaves inside the gallery, and the outdoor bronzes standing among Kensington Gardens’ own trees, permanent objects deliberately placed where they would be measured against living ones. What held the two scales together was the same idea Penone proved on a single trunk in the Maritime Alps in 1968, that whatever is pressed into something growing becomes part of its structure rather than a mark on its surface. Fifty-seven years on, and inside a building that has itself changed use once already, that argument had lost none of its clarity, and a visitor leaving through Kensington Gardens carried it straight back out among the park’s own living, growing trees.