Seeing Through Closed Eyelids

This book provides a material and social history of the art of Giuseppe Penone, a leading protagonist of Arte Povera, whose work explores the interconnectedness of humans and the phenomenal world.

Elizabeth Mangini is an art historian and professor at California College of the Arts, San Francisco.

"In cogent prose, Elizabeth Mangini’s Seeing Through Closed Eyelids establishes the consequence of Penone’s corpus beyond any nominal affiliation or national ascription. Penone, she shows, developed not merely a body of work, but a theory of sculpture – one responsive to international tendencies but rooted in a local engagement with the phenomenology of nature. Examining interrelated bodies of work within a larger career, Mangini’s volume constitutes at once a careful examination of an individual oeuvre and a case study of a fraught moment in post-war Italian culture."

Anthony G. White, associate professor of culture and communication, University of Melbourne:

"Seeing Through Closed Eyelids shows how Giuseppe Penone, one of the most significant artists to emerge from Italy during the 1960s, transformed the history of modern sculpture and reconceptualized our connection to the natural and social environment. As Elizabeth Mangini explains in this cogently argued and beautifully illustrated book, Penone’s sculptures challenge traditional ideals of aesthetic mastery by entangling artist, artwork, and viewer in their material and earthly context. Drawing on a wide range of philosophical, artistic, and political thinkers, ranging from Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Marcel Duchamp and Paolo Virno, Mangini brilliantly exposes the radically anti-anthropocentric nature of the artist’s practice."

Adrian R. Duran, associate professor of art and art history, University of Nebraska Omaha:

"An exceptional contribution to the field. Elizabeth Mangini's readings of Penone's career are dense, expansive, and written with a deft, agile clarity that is stunning in both form and content. Her methodologies are richly layered and informed by ethical insights that make this monograph as much a call to reconsidering our place in the world as Penone's in the history of art. This book is paradigmatic of how our field should move into the future."

Ara H. Merjian, professor of Italian studies and affiliate of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University:

"Though most often associated with Arte Povera, Giuseppe Penone’s artistic practice of the 1960s formed a phenomenon wholly unto itself. In cogent prose, Elizabeth Mangini’s Seeing through Closed Eyelids establishes the consequence of Penone’s corpus beyond any nominal affiliation or national ascription. Penone, she shows, developed not merely a body of work, but a theory of sculpture – one responsive to international tendencies but rooted in a local engagement with the phenomenology of nature. Examining interrelated bodies of work within a larger career, Mangini’s volume constitutes at once a careful examination of an individual oeuvre, and a case study of a fraught moment in post-war Italian culture. We find here a practice which insists upon the physical contingencies of its own making; which stages the effacement of artistic agency alongside quite personal articulations; and which foregrounds the (ever shrinking) porosity between cultural production and the natural world."