Seeing Through Closed Eyelids

Can a work of art help us know our world differently? In this first scholarly study of Giuseppe Penone, art historian Elizabeth Mangini argues that the Italian artists engagement of the bodys multiple senses constitutes a new theory of sculpture as a means to connect with and know the phenomenal world. Through close readings of signal works across Penones five-decade career from his emergence in the context of 1960s Arte povera to his position as a pre-eminent contemporary artist today Mangini demonstrates how Penone refuses modernist opticality, recasts artistic labour, and emphasizes a non-anthropocentric concept of time. Penones approach challenges viewers to broaden their sensory and temporal perceptions, creating structurally significant new ways to understand human experience. Giuseppe Penone is best known for his engagement with trees, which he employs as raw material, imagery, and an active force in the creative process. Seeing Through Closed Eyelids suggests that such works materialize the perceptible tensions between any organism and its environment. By locating Penones art in its social context and connecting it to broader discourses about arts status, theories of phenomenology, and the anthropocene, this book offers an original reading of Penones work, as well as a wider view of the artistic generation for whom sculpture was a means to probe the nature of experience itself at the dawn of postmodernism.