Richard Penn^[29]

Richard Penn is a South African artist living and working in Auckland, New Zealand. He has had numerous solo exhibitions at venues including Gallery AOP in Johannesburg, Nirox Gallery in Johannesburg, Blank Projects in Cape Town, The Origins Centre Museum at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and, most recently, at Everard Read/Circa Gallery in Cape Town and Everard Read Gallery Johannesburg.

He has exhibited both locally and internationally and was the South African representative at The Rybon International Artists’ Workshop in Tehran, Iran in 2012. In 2014 he took up the Ampersand Fellowship to New York, USA.

He is represented in private, corporate and academic collections throughout South Africa and internationally and has shown consistently at both Johannesburg and Cape Town Art Fairs.

In December 2020 he and his family relocated to New Zealand. His work examines the intersection of scientific and artistic vision, using scale and detail as metaphoric devices to reflect on our invested positions as viewers. Working across various media, including painting, drawing, sculpture and animation, Penn explores the relationship between visual and conceptual abstraction.

More recently he has worked exclusively with clay and ceramics and has been awarded a three month studio residency at Auckland Studio Potters in 2021.

Subsurface Travelogue vii, 2019

$1,650.00

Richard Penn's original artwork.

The Subsurface Travelogue series are imagined as a series of underground wanderings through rock strata and pockets of water and gas, sometimes revealing remnants of lost civilisations in the form of imperfectly preserved man-made objects. These forms are based on the designs of Penn’s ceramic sculptures that he imagines are the remnants of a future civilisation that have been buried in time to find their way back to us to be found. They are like scanned spectrographic images made by instruments pushed to the very limits of their effectiveness. Information is tantalizingly specific yet not specific enough to satisfy. It highlights the challenges of distance, time and the limits of technology in our search for origins.

Materials: Ink drawing on paper with aluminium frame

Size: approx. 330x330mm

Framed

Handcrafted, South Africa

Style

Qty.

Richard Penn[29]

Subsurface Travelogue vii, 2019

Richard Penn^[29]