The Tomio Koyama Gallery is pleased to announce that an exhibition of works by Evan Penny will be held from June 30th until July 28th, 2007. Held at the Tomio Koyama Gallery, this marks his first solo exhibition in Japan.
Evan Penny was born in South Africa in 1953, and he completed his Masters course at Alberta College of Art in 1978. He is now based out of Toronto, Canada. Starting with an exhibition in 1981 at the Edmonton Gallery in Edmonton, Canada, his works have been featured various countries, such as Spain and the United States. Recently, his solo exhibition “Absolutely Unreal” was at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary from 2004 to 2005; the exhibition then traveled to other museums throughout Canada. In addition, he was one of 130 artists, others included Ólafur Elíasson, Carsten Höller, and Pipilotti Rist, whose works, dating from the 1940s to contemporary works, were selected for the group exhibition “The Expanded Eye: Stalking the Unseen”, held at Kunsthaus Zurich.
Penny creates amazingly real busts (or full figures) mainly using silicone. His creations are often twice the size of regular humans, which leads the viewer to be strangely captivated. Real human hair is applied to the models’ heads, and freckles and wrinkles are visible from the faces to the naked backs in extremely close detail, like looking through a magnifying glass. The figures will leave you with the feeling that they suddenly appeared right before your eyes. This is because the figures lack the depth of regular human bodies, so that they straddle the border between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional worlds.
Another unique characteristic is how some of the figures are compressed on the sides while simultaneously elongated from top to bottom, which results in an unnatural form. This peculiar shape is derived from a references to digital, manipulated and enhanced images. Penny’s figurative sculptures negociate the space between reflected images and the real world, as he takes the two-dimensional world of the photograph, and then explores, and renders his own interpretation as a three-dimensional sculpture.
While realistic portraits are often based on real people, the characters in Penny’s “No One ? In Particular.” series are fictitious. Penny says, “My interest 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”. For him, these super-realistic portraits do not reflect a story; for us, the viewers, they may represent a radical infinite loop of reality and reflection.
This exhibition will feature 4 new works.
TOMIO KOYAMA GALLREY
Contact information for press materials： Tomoko Omori tel/813-3642-4090
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″Back of Martha″
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″Back of Danny #2″
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″Female Stretch″
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