Evan Penny
| Evan Penny | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1953 South Africa |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Known for | sculptor |
Evan Penny was born in South Africa in 1953. He currently lives and works in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. In 1978 Penny graduated from Alberta College of Art and Design and received a post-graduate degree in sculpture.
Evan Penny makes sculptures of human forms out of silicone, pigment, hair and aluminium. His pieces range from the almost precisely lifelike, to the blurred or stretched. Penny says one of his interests “is to situate the sculptures perceptually between the way we might see each other in real time and space and the way we imagine our equivalent in a photographic representation.” Though his creations are lifelike, Penny believes that “the real can't be represented or symbolized,” leaving everything to be a representation.
Evan Penny’s early works include sculptures, as well as digital photographs. Penny sculptures go beyond the concept of photorealism in three-dimensional space. In his early figural sculptures, Penny stays true to an undistorted, classical human form, although the scale is typically smaller than life-size. One of the most notable pieces from this group is Ali (1984); a full-figure nude of a young woman. The sculpture is hyper-articulated, and Penny renders every inch of the woman’s body in great detail. The result is an uncanny and surreal effect. Penny’s early figurative sculptures were brought together in Absolutely Unreal, a major survey of the artist’s work that traveled to the Museum London in London, Ontario, the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta (2003–2006).
No One – In Particular is a grouping of twice life size sculptures that push the boundaries of representation between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional. These sculptures are imaginary portraits constructed to look like ordinary people but with larger parts of the body. These realistic sculptures are not modelled after a particular person, but rather are amalgamations of human features, generating commentary about the expectation of truth within photography. Penny continues to push the boundary on contemporary sculptural realism in these works through accentuating the variability in the human form.
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