Robyn Penn

Listings(s)

'Pretty World'

Robyn Penn shows a body of new work at David Krut Projects at Arts On Main. Clouds appear as her subject matter and as metaphor for the distractions she negotiates daily. 'They’re clouds which have been added to the landscape,' she explains referencing Muybridge who used photographic techniques to add clouds to the sky of his landscapes. There is an emphasis on process in Penn’s finely detailed, yet expansive views; and an obsession with multiple images. She nurtures a deep irony in the beautiful rendering of perhaps the most horrific moment in human history, the dropping of the atomic bombs that extends into the works titles.

17 November 2011 - 12 February 2012

'Exit'

'Exit' is Robyn Penn’s second solo exhibition at David Krut Projects. In this new body of paintings Penn continues her exploration of the sublime through multiple images, but with significant formal and conceptual departures.

Penn consistently uses photographs as references for series of works, creating new works from the same image as a way to 'push the image, coming back to it again and again; re-seeing it, re-imagining it'. As in other work of Penn's, images taken by Edward Muybridge provide a starting point. Working in the 19th century, Muybridge photographed dramatic cloudscapes which he added to his landscapes using a method of manual 'Photo-shopping', often re-using the same clouds in different images. For Penn, clouds present a metaphor for distraction from the chaos happening on the ground. They also satisfy an interest in the Romantic sublime, notably evident in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich.

This body of work also features paintings of fire escapes – inoffensive structures used exclusively for emergency escape. For Penn, the metaphorical connection between the clouds and the fire escapes relates to the 'ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy of sky [that] cause the here-and-now to dissolve to some extent. We exit to or from, escape to or from something'.

In this body of work, Penn's movement away from faithful figurative representation is also symbolic, in a sense, of an escape from realism.

30 August 2012 - 29 September 2012