Italian artist Giuseppe Penone has played an integral role in the development of art over the past five decades. From his conceptual and performative works of the 1960s and '70s to the large-scale sculptural installations of the past ten years, Penone has explored intimate, sensate, and metaphysical connections with nature.

Working in a stunning variety of materials - including clay, wood, stone, metal, plaster, resin, acacia thorns - the artist makes palpable and present the analogous processes of nature and art: carving large trees along their growth patterns to reveal the sapling contained within; elaborating the interior space of his closed hand into a large-scale sculpture that both contains his hand and enlarges the space it contains; rendering the swirling mists of his breath in the cold in tactile clay forms that contain the impression of his body.

Penone will speak in conjunction with the exhibition Giuseppe Penone: Being the River, Repeating the Forest, which will be the first U.S. museum exhibition of the artist’s work in over 30 years and will feature a selection of work in a variety of materials highlighting the development of Penone’s ideas over the course of his career.