Evan Penny is well known internationally and in Canada for his hyperreal sculptural portraits and figures, both faithfully rendered to life and distorted, stretched or blurred. Working with silicone, pigment, hair, fabric, resin and aluminum, he has garnered international acclaim for his work that explores the effects of traditional and digital photography on sculptural realism, and how we might experience those effects in time and space.
Penny was born in 1953 in what was then Zimbabwe but is now South Africa. His father moved the family to northern Alberta in 1964. Penny’s love for sculpting became evident on the first day of sculpture class at the Alberta College of Art and Design. He graduated in 1975 with honours, and two years later returned to pursue his post-graduate studies before relocating to live and work in Toronto. Going against the conceptualist grain of the 1980s, he became known in Canada for his smaller than life-sized hyperrealist models done in resin. In the early 1990s he concurrently worked in the film industry as a special effects creator on over 25 films, including Natural Born Killers, Nixon and JFK.
Penny’s current conceptual trajectory began in 1998, which takes as its starting point the implicit artifice inherent in any representation of the “real.” Penny tries to situate his sculpture in between the way we perceive each other in real time and space, and the way we perceive ourselves and each other in an image. His L. Faux project, for example, from 2005 is a sculpture of a woman’s head, cropped at the shoulders like a passport photograph, confronting the viewer as both image and object. Another sculpture entitled Murray, maintains its proportions when viewed head-on, however when viewed obliquely, it compresses and distorts, going from full volume to flatness.
In 2007 Penny began working with 3-D scanning processes in which he could digitally alter the information before printing with foam to create the sculptural base. More recently, Penny created a series in which he imagines himself in the future as well as the past, a project which visually illustrates the crisis of confidence in imagery today. Rather than assert identity, his works hope to question it; in the process complicating the viewer’s relationships to their body and others.
Alongside numerous domestic and international solo shows, a 12-year survey of his work Re Figured toured museums in Germany, Austria and Italy before concluding at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2012. His work was also included in RESHAPED REALITY: 50 Years of Hyperrealistic Sculpture which showed at museums in Australia, The Netherlands, Mexico, Spain and Denmark. In 2017 an exhibition entitled Evan Penny: Ask Your Body was held at the Chiesa di San Samuele as part of the 57th Venice Biennale.