Giuseppe Penone returns to Hong Kong after 45 years for exhibition

An exhibition in Asia 45 years ago helped establish Giuseppe Penone as a major figure in one of Europe’s most significant contemporary art movements.

In 1970, the then 23-year-old Italian artist was included in two influential exhibitions that acknowledged his role in the budding Arte Povera movement.

One was in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The other was “Between Man and Matter”, an exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum that also featured Richard Serra and other prominent names.

“Being included in those exhibitions was a breakthrough for me. After the Tokyo exhibition, I stopped briefly in Hong Kong and that was the last time I came here,” he says at the start of his solo exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery.

Today, he looks back at the 1960s and early ’70s as a time of infinite possibilities. The Italian economy was booming. In fact, it is often said that the country experienced il miracolo economico for roughly two decades between the post-war stimulus of the Marshall Plan and the 1973 oil crisis.

Meanwhile, the Western world was being turned upside down by events such as the Vietnam war protests, women’s liberation movement and the 1968 Paris uprising.