Leaves of Light
Giuseppe Penone (Born 1947) · 2017
In the plaza beneath the dome stands a tall bronze tree, its trunk rough and its bare branches reaching up toward the metal lattice overhead. Among the branches are small mirrors, and as the rain of light moves across the space the mirrors catch the spots and throw them back onto the walls and floor. The tree seems to be gathering the light of the dome and scattering it. Giuseppe Penone made the work for this exact place, and its title, Leaves of Light, tells you that the reflections are its foliage.
Penone belongs to the Italian Arte Povera generation of the late 1960s and has spent his career on the relationship between the human body and trees: casting trunks in bronze, carving young trees out of old beams, pressing his hand into growing bark. Look at the surface of this trunk, which was cast from a real tree so that every ridge of bark is preserved, and at the way the branches have been arranged to echo the star pattern of the dome. Nearby, on one of the plaza walls, is a second Penone work, Propagation, a drawing of concentric rings spreading from a single fingerprint, that of Sheikh Zayed, the founder of the United Arab Emirates, like growth rings in a tree or ripples in water.
The museum commissioned Penone and the American artist Jenny Holzer to make permanent works for the plaza when it opened in 2017, so that contemporary art would greet visitors in the open air rather than being kept to the last gallery. The tree stands where the museum's channels of seawater meet the light, which makes it a kind of emblem of the whole building: nature, geometry and reflection in one object. Visit in the late afternoon, when the mirrors are busiest.
Did You Know? The concentric rings of Penone's companion wall drawing spread from an actual fingerprint of Sheikh Zayed, the founding president of the United Arab Emirates.
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