Evan Penny Exhibition
Sperone Westwater
This event has ended.
For this exhibition of ten new works, Penny has expanded his practice of creating “altered” renderings of the human figure from silicone, pigment, hair and aluminum. With the exception of "Large Murray," (2008), the artist’s first free-standing sculpture in many years, Penny’s preferred format continues to be the classic portrait bust, transformed by enlarging, stretching and skewing the subject’s features. Penny’s focus has been to push the boundaries of representation by creating hyperreal sculptures which are neither fully three dimensional nor two dimensional.
In several of the new works on view, Penny develops his technique even further to incorporate elements of time-based photography and three-dimensional pictorial organization. In "Panagiota: Conversation #1,Variation 2" (2008) and "Panagiota: Conversation #2, Variation 1" (2008), Penny has created a portrait from in-motion photographs that were taken of his friend Panagiota speaking. For the first time, he has introduced time and motion as formal considerations in his work. The result is that we see the subject as she moves through time – specifically as she converses with Penny. In "Self, variation #1" (2008), the distortion of the self portrait does not derive from frontal, two-dimensional pictorial references such as forced perspective, anamorphism, stretching or alteration. Instead, the geometry of the piece is based on a three-dimensional rhomboid, where all 6 sides of a cube are pulled and skewed. In the end, there is no single view in which "Self, variation #1" (2008) fully resolves into an undistorted, naturalistically proportioned image.
[Image: Evan Penny "Self, variation #1" (2008) silicone, pigment, hair, aluminum, 23 x 46 x 21 in.]
Media
Schedule
from January 09, 2009 to February 14, 2009