Horizon is Richard Penn’s second solo exhibition at GALLERY AOP.  Drawings in pen and ink characteristically form the main focus of the exhibition, but a number of limited edition prints extends his formal repertoire: a large-scale black-and-white linocut and a suite of etchings.

Penn’s drawings are executed in a super-fine hand without ever making the viewer uncomfortable about their labour intensive, obsessive and complex nature: their playful randomness draws the viewer effortlessly into a kind of super-sensory state of awareness.

In the brochure which accompanies the exhibition Anthea Buys extends this notion by saying that “throughout ... Richard Penn’s drawings there is the paradoxical suggestion of being at once very close to and very far from, the indefinable forms that populate the works. One becomes lost in pictorial scale. In the same way, with the appropriate technology, the eye is able to equalise the enormous and the atomic. Lenses and artificial retinas of the sort used in space telescopes bring objects that are truly millions of light-years apart onto a single page, and molecules that are massed and indistinguishable from one another, perhaps even invisible by the billion, are scattered by the magnifying power of a microscope. “

 

“As an artist”, says Richard Penn, “ I am interested in science and in the origins of things: the origins of life itself (abiogenesis), as well as the origins of a more personal cast in terms of the hereditary nature of such traits as a distinctive mode of ‘gesture’ and of a personal ‘characteristic’. Horizon continues the exploration started in my previous exhibition, …and to that sea return, of these ideas through a kind of probing into areas of reality that are very difficult to visualize, such as that which is very distant, extremely large or minutely small. I have borrowed the format and shape of many of the images in my work from the format in which data is compiled and presented by the powerful space telescopes, the Hubble and the Kepler. The Hubble Space Telescope searches out the most distant and earliest sources of light in the universe and provides us with data that reaches back to the very beginning of time, while the Kepler Space Telescope has been used to identify planetary systems within the Milky Way, expanding the scientific thesis for the presence and proliferation of other life forms in our galaxy. My work grasps at processes that lie beyond our horizons and outside of an evolutionary imperative to apprehend the universe”.

Richard Penn is a self-taught animator. He received a BA(FA) and an MFA (with distinction, 2009) from the university of the Witwatersrand. He was overall winner of the Sasol New Signatures Art Competition (2004) and received the Everard Read Art Award (merit prize, 2006). He has co-animated two short films, and directed and animated three short films of his own. In 2010 he started STRANGE Blue duck, which offers stop-frame animation  workshops to children and team-building animation workshops to corporates. Richard Penn has had two solo exhibitions at GALLERY AOP: …and to that sea return (2010) and Horizon (2012). He has a studio at the Bag Factory, Fordsburg, Johannesburg.