Canadian artist Evan Penny (born 1953) makes the kind of sculpture that is so realistic, so detailed and so plainly a demonstration of virtuoso ability that it can literally stop people in their tracks. Modeled with tremendous craftsmanship in aluminium, silicone, epoxy resin and pigments, his freestanding nude figures and portrait heads invite the viewer to examine every fleshy imperfection and intimate crevice. The twist in this extreme realism is their anamorphically skewed perspective, so that what appears to be a conventionally dimensioned figure from one angle turns out to be wildly distorted from another. Penny uses electronic image editing and 3D scanning to create these effects, which transform an initial experience of ultra-realism into a vertiginous encounter massively mediated by artifice and technology. This volume surveys Penny's sculptural works of the past three decades.
Featured image, Murray #3, 2008, is reproduced from Evan Penny: Re Figured.
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FROM THE BOOK
"Torn between a sculptural force and a claim to photographic authenticity, Penny discovered the problem that would occupy him from this point onwards: the intermediate space between two-dimensional visual media and three-dimensional sculpture. When asked to describe this current phase of work in one sentence, the artist replied: 'I try to situate my sculpture somewhere between the way we perceive each other in real time and space and the way we perceive ourselves and each other in an image.' Hybrid beings emerge in these worlds, whose claims to authenticity unavoidably overwhelms us as viewers: by virtue of the photographic precision of their surfaces and their physical penetration of our habitat. Their anomalies--twists, stretches, compressions, fractured dimensions and color error--are able to engender the enjoyable horror of a freak show at a fair. And yet we are forced to recognize that we are confronted at first hand with the deformities of the human image in our media age. Each sculpture represents a materialized mental experiment that the artist himself describes as follows: 'What would happen if I take a distortion of the human body that is 'normalized' in an image context, that we might assume belongs exclusively to the image world, and bring that into the space we physically occupy?' The approximately forty works being presented in the European-Canadian touring exhibition supply us with the answer: a strong emotional reaction full of abysmal horror and insatiable fascination."
FORMAT: Hbk, 9.25 x 12 in. / 160 pgs / 126 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $45.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $60 ISBN: 9783865609908 PUBLISHER: Walther König, Köln AVAILABLE: 9/30/2011 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA LA ASIA AU/NZ AFR
Canadian artist Evan Penny (born 1953) makes the kind of sculpture that is so realistic, so detailed and so plainly a demonstration of virtuoso ability that it can literally stop people in their tracks. Modeled with tremendous craftsmanship in aluminium, silicone, epoxy resin and pigments, his freestanding nude figures and portrait heads invite the viewer to examine every fleshy imperfection and intimate crevice. The twist in this extreme realism is their anamorphically skewed perspective, so that what appears to be a conventionally dimensioned figure from one angle turns out to be wildly distorted from another. Penny uses electronic image editing and 3D scanning to create these effects, which transform an initial experience of ultra-realism into a vertiginous encounter massively mediated by artifice and technology. This volume surveys Penny's sculptural works of the past three decades.
