Idee di Pietra (Ideas of Stone)

Idee di Pietra (Ideas of Stone)

Fondly known as “the tree”, Idee di Pietra is a large-scale, outdoor sculpture created by the Italian artist Giuseppe Penone in 2004, with eight granite rocks lodged in the branches that Penone carefully collected from a river near his home.

The work plays with the notion of legibility and exists as a double irony: on the one hand, despite its monumental size, the work is often mistaken for a real tree found in nature. The creation of the tree, however, actually involved a lengthy process of molding and casting, and called for great finesse from the artist. The rocks that create an uncanny effect and that serve as the cue to the work’s status as a piece of art, on the other hand, are the most natural part of the entire sculpture.

Giuseppe Penone (b. 1947)

Subject and description taken from a longer study of Ideas of Stone written by Zhiyan Yang, a doctoral student in Art History.
https://arts.uchicago.edu/public-art-campus/browse-work/idee-di-pietra-ideas-stone

Completed 2004-2007
Installed 2010

Granite boulders with steel and bronze
Height x length: 504 x 120 in. (1280.2 x 304.8 cm)

Located at Booth School of Business, Charles M. Harper Center
5807 S. Woodlawn Avenue

Sculpture