Penny Evan: Rendering Realities

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.