| ARTIST BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: | Evan Penny is a conceptually-based figurative sculptor living in Toronto. His work investigates the unstable boundaries between reality and illusion, object and representation. He was born in South Africa, immigrating to Canada in 1964. He earned an Honours Fine Art Diploma from Alberta College of Art (1975), returning there two years later to pursue post-graduate studies in sculpture. He has also worked as a prop-builder and special-effects expert for Hollywood movies.
From his earliest sculptural busts in 1970s, Penny has examined how the conventions of classicism and romanticism have influenced our concepts of realism. Using layers of colour, pigmented silicone, hair, fabric and resin, Penny’s hyper-real sculptures are at once realistic and highly artificial, familiar and uncanny. With the advent of digital photography, he also explores our expectation of truth within photography. Sculptures, and photographs of those sculptures, are often exhibited together, juxtaposing the conventions of the 2-D and 3-D world. He deliberately uses distorting techniques: skewed proportions or a perverse colour scheme. He also introduces technologies such as offset printing and 3-D scanning.
Addressing the question of the self shifting through time, one of his series, Panagiota – Conversation (2007-08), shows blurred, almost panoramic views of a woman’s face as she moves and changes expression while speaking. Penny has also produced sculptural versions of his past and future selves (2012), based on photographs and personal (flawed) memories of himself at 17, and on observations of his father. The titles, “Portrait of the Artist as He Was (Not)” and “as He Will (Not) Be,” underline the subjective, imaginary nature of our sense of personal history.
In 2012, a touring exhibition of his works from 2000-2011, Evan Penny RE FIGURED, travelled through Canada, Germany, Austria and Italy. In 2016, the National Gallery of Canada exhibited his work in Human Scale. Evan Penny: Ask Your Body (Venice, 2017) openly references artists from other eras, such as Holbein and Géricault, representing the sacrificial or fragmented body. The exhibit, on a monumental scale, addresses our visceral reaction to artworks.
Penny’s work appears in public collections at the National Gallery, Ottawa, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Calgary Glenbow, amongst others; and in several US galleries. He is the subject of numerous publications and catalogue essays.
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