After his solo exhibition in 2008, Giuseppe Penone returns to Villa Medici with a project conceived specifically for the private rooms of Cardinal Ferdinando de' Medici's historic apartment. The context is the Art Club exhibition cycle curated by Pier Paolo Pancotto. The artist highlights the singularity of the spaces by presenting a group of works (Vaso, 1986; Il vuoto del vaso, 2005; Avvolgere la terra – vaso, 2005; and the series Terra su terra – bacile, 2005) that are emblematic of his idea of sculpture: reflection on the materiality of forms, their visual perception, the encounter between gesture and material.

The Bibliothèque nationale de France hosts for the first time an exhibition entirely dedicated to Giuseppe Penone, which invites us to discover the links between man and nature, reflecting on the value of time, the imprint and memory. Penone has produced for the occasion a spectacular installation, Pensieri e linfa (Sap and Thought), the frottage of an acacia trunk of thirty meters along which flows an uninterrupted text handwritten on linen canvas, the result of fifty years of reflections and creations on the topics dearest to the artist. Alongside this emblematic work, other works never shown before are exhibited, such as the twelve monumental Alberi-book or the series of Leaves of Grass, painted with fingertips, inspired by the first edition of Walt Whitman's poem. Drawings, photographic works and artist's books are also included, as well as a series of 18 newly created engravings, which, donated by Penone, will now become part of the library's collections.

The solo exhibition organized by Gagosian in Athens is the opportunity to present a new series of works created by the artist in the last year and which give the exhibition its title: Impronte di corpi nell’aria (Bodies Imprinted in the Air). Sculptures made of marble and bronze that evoke the growth of plant life out of stone as though from earth, in dialogue with other previous creations that share the research on the interaction between the human body and nature, that Penone has been conducting since the beginning of his career.

More than 30 selected works of art, including sculptures, installations, drawings, engravings and photographs over a fifty years activity up to the artist's latest unedited creations, dialogue in the spaces of the Uffizi Galleries with the masterpieces of the historic Florentine museum, in a comparison full of suggestions and references. The exhibition, entitled Alberi in versi(Trees in verse), is part of the Dante celebrations planned for 2021 and was announced in March by the installation of the monumental steel and bronze tree, Abete (Fir, 2013), in Piazza Signoria.

For the Festival dei due Mondi in Spoleto, the Galleria d'arte moderna "G. Carandente" presents an exhibition entirely devoted to drawing, the first of its kind by Penone in Italy, after the one at the Drawing Center in New York in 2007: 35 drawings, along with a group of photographic works, from the sketches on notebook pages that accompany his beginnings at the end of the 1960s to the colored plates of the Soffi series of 1977-1978 and of the more recent Foglie (2014), as well as the Gesti vegetali.