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.

Giuseppe Penone’s Idee di pietra – olmo (Ideas of Stone – Elm Tree, 2008) – The Listener has been installed in Venice as part of the 17th Biennale Architettura of La Biennale di Venezia. This year’s exhibition brings together artists and architects to explore the question “How Will We Live Together?” At just over twenty-nine feet high, Penone’s sculpture, comprising a bronze elm tree cradling a heavy stone, is partially submerged in the Venetian lagoon at the Arsenale site.

Originally set up in the Serpentine Gallery in London, the exhibition by the studio Formafantasma is renewed in the spaces of the Centro Pecci of Prato with new suggestions. The Albero in torsione sinistra (Left Twist Tree, 1988), belonging to one of Penone's most iconic series, in which a carpentry beam is stripped of its bark and excavated to reveal the original form of the tree as it grows, fully participates in the theme of the exhibition inspired by wood, a raw material that has always been employed in industry and that has the characteristic of being firstly a living material.

On 25 March 2021, the day consecrated to the memory of the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri on the 700th anniversary of his death, Giuseppe Penone's Abete (Fir, 2013) is inaugurated in Piazza della Signoria in Florence (Italy). The trunk and branches of this gigantic tree are made of cast stainless steel and wrapped in a spiral by a grid of eighteen cast bronze elements. At just over 72 feet high, Penoneʼs sculpture is the largest ever installed in a public space in Florence and is a preview of the solo exhibition planned for July at the Uffizi Galleries.