Galleries in Paris

MICHELANGELO PENSO  Hommage à Gaston de Pawlowski

Michelangelo Penso is one of the most influential artist on the Italian contemporary art scene. Specialized in sculpture, installation and drawing, he has always been interested in various materials. His latest works, developing a new concept of sculpture, are composed by materials of industrial origin, such as rubber and polyester belts or pieces of aluminum and steel: genetic structures expanded to fill a real space.

Working in a space between art and science, Penso’s pieces are conceived to be understood both in the macro aesthetic and in the micro aesthetic domain. His sculptures and installation are clearly and objectively perceived, but they also recall the other senses, indeed, creating different connections and images in our brain. All his consideration is about memory: the memory of a past life in a distant place (as for the drawn moleskins series) or the memory of a genetic and biological form (as for his latest works), to be continuously changed and modify.

For this exhibition, Michelangelo Penso chose to pay tribute to the French writer Gaston de Pawlowski, who inspired Marcel Duchamp in his artwork « The Large Glass », referring to Chapter XXXIII of his novel Journey to the land of the Fourth dimension (1912), in which he speaks about giant bacterium.

As the metaphor of the human condition and its fragility, a giant sculpture  (Physarum polycephalum, 2013) completely invade, in a disturbing way, the gallery space from the first to the second floor, opened and inaugurated on this occasion.