Evan Penny: Re Figured

EXHIBITION OVERVIEW

The AGO is pleased to present this large-scale survey exhibition devoted to the Canadian sculptor Evan Penny. The exhibition will include over 30 works including larger-than-life sculptures, photographs and an exhibition film about the artist's work providing an overview of the artist's production over the past decade.

Evan Penny has advanced hyper realistic sculpture, founded by Duane Hanson in the late 1960s, to an unprecedented level. He has surpassed his contemporaries and predecessors in his precise rendering of the minute details of the human image. His painstakingly crafted figures are composed of layers of colour pigmented silicone, hair, fabric and resin. They come across not only as realistic but also as highly artificial. This impression is enhanced by Penny's distortive techniques; often presenting an otherwise life-like portrait bust in skewed proportions or in a perverse colour scheme. In this sense, Penny addresses how the human image is produced and controlled by modern-day technologies such as photography, offset printing, and 3-D scanning.

The AGO owns Stretch # 1 by Evan Penny, which was one of the most popular works of art with our visitors at the time of our reopening in 2008.

Click here to watch coverage of the exhibition, including an interview with Evan Penny, from the SPACE channel's InnerSPACE.