Giuseppe Penone: Thoughts in the Roots at Serpentine South Gallery

3^rd April 2025

Constance A

Constance A

3 April 2025

With spring’s hesitant arrival, London begins to loosen its collar. Kensington Gardens becomes a theatre of the seasonal: dog walkers led by improbable tangles of leashes, children running around, the occasional horse rider trotting past. Here, among the clipped lawns and blooming flower patches, the Serpentine South Gallery offers a natural pause – and a deep inhalation. Inside, Thoughts in the Roots, a quietly astonishing exhibition by the Italian artist Giuseppe Penone, makes a case for nature not merely as subject, but as co-author.

Penone, born in the Alpine woods of Piedmont, has long made trees his collaborators. His favoured materials – wood, leaves, bronze, marble, resin – are not symbols of the natural world so much as its extensions; in his hands, nature is not represented, but enacted. The exhibition spans works from 1969 to the present, and the Serpentine’s architecture, all soft curves and glass, seems to lean into the show’s premise: that the boundary between the human and the vegetal is porous, tender and ongoing.

At its centre is Respirare l’ombra (To Breathe the Shadow), an immersive installation in which thousands of dried laurel leaves are densely packed into the gallery walls. The scent, faint, earthy and uncannily familiar, hangs in the air. A golden cast of human lungs emerges from the leaves: a luminous exhale, the respiratory system made a monument. For Penone, leaves are not mere symbols but vital organs of the world – producers of the oxygen on which all animal life depends. As you walk through the space, the scent seems to settle in your memory; it recalls childhood walks through shadowy woods, dry leaves crackling underfoot or the quiet comfort of bay simmering in a kitchen pot.

In Soffio di Foglie (Breath of the Leaves), the artist lay down on a bed of dried leaves, breathing in their scent and leaving behind the imprint of his body. It’s at once intimate and impersonal, as though the forest itself had remembered him. Nearby, a tree grows from a ceramic pot; suspended above it is a porcelain plaque bearing a photographic self-portrait of the artist. The eyes are pierced and hollow, allowing sprigs of greenery to sprout through the sockets. In this “Dada-esque” work, vision is no longer human alone. Penone sees through the forest, or perhaps the forest sees through him.

The exhibition does not confine itself to the white cube. Step outside, and Penone’s vision spills into the garden itself. Albero Folgorato (Thunderstruck Tree), a bronze cast of a willow struck by lightning and lined with gold leaf, stands like a wounded oracle. It gleams with something sacred, the violence of nature made still and shining. Idee di Pietra (Ideas of Stone), meanwhile, suspends heavy river rocks in the branches of trees. The stones perch like improbable fruit or ancient eggs, defying gravity and expectation.

Penone is no preacher. Though his ecological concerns run deep, there is no manifesto here – only a quiet, persistent suggestion that the human body is not so different from bark, that our existence is inseparable from the natural world. And yet, we continue to damage what is, in essence, our life source: the air we breathe, the trees we depend on, the environment that sustains us. In an era when billionaires embark on 11-minute joy rides into space, this show stands as a profound and necessary reminder of who we are – and perhaps, too, of how estranged from that truth the world has become.

In the end, the scents in this show are its quiet triumph – the dry rustle of leaves, the warm musk of wood, the soft, elusive perfume of laurel. They form an invisible architecture, wrapping the viewer in memory and stillness. This is an exhibition you experience through your lungs as much as your eyes. And when you step back into Kensington Gardens, where the dog walkers carry on, the trees sway gently, and everything seems, for a moment, in breath.

Constance Ayrton
Image: Giuseppe Penone, Alberi libro (Book Trees), 2017 and Respirare l’ombra (To Breathe the Shadow), 2000, installation view, Serpentine South. Photo: George Darrell. Courtesy Giuseppe Penone and Serpentine.

Giuseppe Penone: Thoughts in the Roots is at Serpentine South from 3^rd April until 7^th September 2025. For further information or to book, visit the exhibition’s website here.