This year's Bloomberg commission is Spazio di Luce created by Italian artist Guiseppe Penone. The life sized and hollowed Larch tree stands in the Whitechapel Gallery, balanced on its spindly branches, in a way not dissimilar to a stick insect. This sculpture was created by covering a tree in layers of wax, before casting this wax in bronze. Where the tree once was, has now become empty space, it's surface painted in gold leaf.
The exterior of the cast, resembling the texture of tree bark, is actually made by the marks of human hands- evidence of its creation process. This similarity between our fingerprints and the exterior of the tree, showing our inextricable links to nature. The tree: large in its scale and positioned in the centre of the gallery, places importance on this apparently strong robust structure. But there's also a stillness there, a sense of morbidity, for the tree is no longer there, there is no life. The fragility of the tree has been highlighted through an act of human destruction.