Evan Penny Goes to Venice

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Eight works by Evan Penny have arrived in Venice from his Toronto studio and are being installed for a solo exhibition organized by Calgary’s TrépanierBaer Gallery. Evan Penny: Ask Your Body shows the artist’s mature work in the intimate setting of Chiesa San Samuele, a venerable church near the Grand Canal. The exhibition, one of the myriad events running concurrently with the Venice Biennale, which opens May 13, gives international audiences a chance to see the work of one of Canada’s exceptional contemporary artists. Across town at the Canadian pavilion is Canada’s official representative at the Biennale, Vancouver artist Geoffrey Farmer, whose exhibition explores family history and intergenerational trauma. TrépanierBaer considers Penny’s show, on view until November, their unofficial Canada 150 project.

Penny will debut four sculptures he has made over the last 18 months. Those who know his work have come to expect a fascinating technical finish to Penny’s uncannily lifelike representations of the human body. These works are charged by a more evident personal engagement with art history, pulling from Roman statuary as well as paintings by Northern Renaissance artist Hans Holbein the Younger and French Romantic Théodore Géricault. Penny's works, in their tussle with the West’s cultural and religious inheritance, pack a visceral punch.

The church’s ambience promises to heighten both the sensory and spiritual experience, inviting meditation on the temporal nature of life, mortality and the spirit incarnate. The spare structure, with its simple vaulted nave and groined vaults over the side aisles, affords formal clarity to the sculptures. The work’s scale will be compelling within the proportions of the space and the well-worn surfaces of stone, marble and plaster have a kinship with the material qualities of Penny’s sculptures.

The exhibition, curated by Berlin-based Michael Short, creates an arc. Starting in the vestibule, visitors may glimpse themselves in two smoky Venetian mirrors. Upon entering the church sanctuary, they confront two large black-and-white autobiographically constructed photographs, Portrait of the Artist as He Was (Not) and Portrait of the Artist as He Will (Not) Be. Nearby are their sculptural counterparts, Young Self: Portrait of the Artist as He Was (Not), Variation #4 and Old Self: Portrait of the Artist as He Will (Not) Be, Variation #4. Together, these pieces, all created in 2011, offer a deft summation of Penny’s earlier work. They draw on photographs of himself as a young man and of his father, but also on his memories of how he used to feel and his apprehension about growing older.

Since his 1978 graduation from the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary, Penny has investigated various modes of representing the body. He has examined the classical figure, the relationship of photography to sculpture and the perception of form and void. He has manipulated scale and explored the effects of distortion, compression and stretching as well as the relation of time to image. His two- and three-dimensional heads and bodies, both portraits and fictions, have attracted national and international attention, and his work has been widely collected in both North America and Europe.

Penny summarized his motivation in an interview with David Moos, a former curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, for the 2011 exhibition catalogue Evan Penny: Re Figured.

“If I distill my interest down to a simple idea, it’s that I’m always trying to place the sculptures in a perceptual space between the way we feel and experience ourselves and each other physically, in real time and space, and how we see and experience ourselves or the other in an image, contemporary or historic. And that it should, ideally, give you both experiences simultaneously.”

Early in his career, Penny modelled figures in clay, which he then cast in bronze. He also worked in the film industry, where he used a range of techniques and materials. He still returns to clay for some stages of production, but now draws on his entire technical repertoire in his complex fabrications. The silicone sculptures in this show, for instance, are skillfully pigmented and have meticulously applied hair.

Hanging Torso, 2017, confronts the viewer with monumental heft. A reference to a Roman fragment of a sculpture of a centaur in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, it hangs suspended upside-down like a piece of butchered meat.

Meanwhile, Marsyas, 2017, alludes to a Roman copy of a Greek sculpture in Turkey. Considered a proto-Christ figure, the satyr Marsyas dared challenge Apollo to a contest and was cruelly punished. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid describes Marsyas’ suffering: “Marsyas cried ‘Why do you peel me out of myself?’ … As he screams, the skin is flayed from the surface of his body, no part is untouched. Blood flows everywhere, the exposed sinews are visible, and the trembling veins quiver, without skin to hide them: you can number the internal organs, and the fibres of the lungs, clearly visible in his chest.”

In Homage to Holbein, Variation #2, 2016, Penny sets the stretched body of Christ into a niche reminiscent of an early Christian catacomb. This is his second iteration based on the last of Holbein’s religious paintings, The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, 1520-1522. The sculpture’s visceral punch and visual fascination echo the anxiety and aching sadness inherent in Holbein’s painting, making it palpable to a contemporary audience.

Self Portrait after Géricault's Fragments Anatomiques, 2017, makes a poignant addition to the long list of works by contemporary artists who refer to Géricault’s monumental painting, The Raft of the Medusa, 1818-1819. The politically charged painting of the aftermath of the wreck of a French frigate off the coast of Senegal, a gruesome and shocking tale of greed, panic and cannibalism, has new currency today. Géricault spent three years doing research, even drawing dissected cadavers he brought into his studio. Based on Géricault’s studies, Penny cast his own legs and one arm to make a sculptural model. He had found a fresh approach to the self-portrait as a heap of dismembered limbs, one with a certain rightness, a testament to his intense commitment as an artist. The Latin phrase “interroga corpus tuum” inscribed on the work’s base translates as “ask your body.”

Setting this exhibition in Venice provides a compelling context for Penny’s art of the self-portrait. The long history of an extraordinary city encourages one to consider personal realities within a larger cultural narrative. Penny invites viewers to touch base with the presence in the mirror, recognize shared human experiences and investigate the powerful frameworks of pagan and Christian history, particularly the relationship between a patriarchal god and a sacrificial mortal, the religious archetype of father and son.

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