Rod Penner Exhibition

Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe

[Image: Rod Penner "San Saba Butane" (2017) Acrylic on canvas, 6 x 6 in.]

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AMERINGER | McENERY | YOHE presents an exhibition of recent works by Rod Penner. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by John Seed.

In his intimately scaled paintings, Rod Penner captures the desolate and deserted landscapes of small-town Texas with astounding clarity. Using a single drawer of Liquitex acrylics and brushes as small as #000, he renders each worn brick, pavement crack, and fallen leaf in precise detail. His handling of the delicate surfaces and distinctive colors lends the works a dreamlike intensity.

When choosing his subject matter, Penner specifically seeks out closed, empty, or abandoned buildings, and takes photographs that serve as starting points for his paintings. Rather than rigorously reproducing the landscape before him, he edits the images over time to adjust the mood and heighten the sense of melancholy and isolation. In carefully selecting what to paint and what to leave out, he strives to invoke a memory of something intangible that the viewer will recognize. Despite their haunting quality, Penner’s paintings also suggest a sense of optimism and determination, and celebrate the American virtues of grit and endurance.

Eschewing nostalgia, the artist strives to paint objectively, noting that “…having grown up in Canada, I’m thankful I don’t have any childhood memories of these small Texas towns that might interfere with my observations.” He does, however, display a profound and genuine sense of American culture. As John Seed writes, “Penner is an individual—a classic outsider in many ways—who walks his own road and then paints it with astonishing singularity.”

ROD PENNER (b. 1965, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) attended Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada before receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1986 from Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

He has had numerous solo exhibitions at such venues as OK Harris, New York, NY; Amarillo Museum of Art, Amarillo, TX; Kauffman Galleries, Houston, TX; and Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY.

Recent group exhibitions include “Hyperrealism - 50 Years of Painting,” Kunsthal Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; “Photorealism. 50 Years of Hyperrealistic Painting,” which traveled to Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn, Estonia, Musée d’Ixelles, Ixelles, Belgium, and Osthaus Museum Hagen, Hagen, Germany; “Differing Views: Rackstraw Downes, Richard Estes, Yvonne Jacquette, Andrew Lenaghan and Rod Penner,” George Adams Gallery, New York, NY; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; “Hyperrealism 1967 – 2013,” Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, Bilbao, Spain; “Photorealism: 50 Years of Hyperrealistic Painting,” which traveled to Kunsthalle Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany; Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain; Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, England; and Musée d’Ixelles, Ixelles, Belgium; “Our Own Directions: Four Decades of Photorealism from the Louis K. and Susan P. Meisel Collection,” Mana Contemporary Art Center, Jersey City, NJ; “Expansion,” Bernarducci Meisel Gallery, New York, NY; “American Dream,” The National Museum in Krakow, Krakow, Poland; and “Shock of the Real: Photorealism Revisited,” Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, FL.

His work is included in the permanent collections of The Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK; The Virlane Foundation, New Orleans, LA; The Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, MI; and Oral Roberts University, Tulsa, OK, among others.

Rod Penner lives and works in Marble Falls, TX.