Robyn Penn

Floating World

28 March - 26 April

Experience Robyn Penn’s first solo exhibition with Artor Contemporary. Floating World explores the transient nature of time, memory, and perception. These works embrace the fluidity of experience, dissolving fixed moments into something elusive and dreamlike. Layers of wax both preserve and obscure, mirroring the way memory blurs and reshapes reality. Without clear horizons, the paintings evoke an inner space rather than a defined place, capturing the impermanence of life. Drawing on François Jullien’s idea of "painting the clouds to evoke the moon," this series reflects the beauty of the ungraspable—where time resists being anchored, and meaning exists in the in-between.

Robyn Penn, Holding Pattern I, 2025

Robyn Penn, Floating World, 2025

Installation view, Artor Contemporary

The title of this collection of works is taken from the Japanese genre of print during the Edo period —‘Ukiyo-e’ meaning ‘pictures of the floating world’. The works hope to create a unique visual language that captures the interplay between time, memory, and nostalgia.

Drawing inspiration from François Jullien’s concept of “painting the clouds to evoke the moon”, I seek to ‘hold time’—to make visible a kind of ‘non-time’ that is both remembered and suspended in a dreamlike state. Distilling imagery to its essential elements is akin to painting a haiku, where simplicity carries depth. My paintings without horizons evoke an inner space rather than a specific place or moment, offering views of the world that reflect a state of mind rather than a direct representation. These images begin with an idea, a picture, yet in the process of making, they dissolve, becoming something more elusive. For me, the work is less about fixing a moment in time and more about expressing how the temporal world resists being anchored—how life, in its passing, remains fluid and ungraspable. I aim to articulate that which is provisional, impermanent, and difficult to pin down.

I submerge my paintings in a layer of wax, both preserving and obscuring them—much like memory itself, where clarity and distortion coexist. Our perception of the world is always blurred, shaped as much by what we see as by what fades from view. I am fascinated by how our minds actively construct time, not as a fixed sequence but as something fluid and shifting. There is no singular, coherent narrative; we are the ones turning. As Carlo Rovelli so beautifully expresses, “The world is not so much made of stones as of fleeting sounds or waves moving through the sea.” We understand the world in its becoming, not in its being. “Change is ubiquitous without being ordered by time.” -Robyn Penn

Robyn Penn, Floating World, 2025

Rilke's Cloud, Installation view 

Robyn Penn, Floating World, 2025

Installation view, Artor Contemporary

Robyn Penn, Floating World, 2025
As if to say, Installation view

Robyn Penn (b. 1973 Johannesburg) is a South African born artist based in Auckland, New Zealand Aotearoa. Through a practice that straddles painting, printmaking, drawing, sculpture and film, she explores the relationship between nature and humankind, and experience and knowledge. For several years Penn has considered the catastrophic impact of humans on the planet and contrasts this with our awe when faced with the natural sublime. Her work speaks to the history of painting, and reflects on how the aesthetic conventions of Romanticism and Modernism translate in postcolonial contexts.

Talking about her work, Penn says, “I make images of everyday objects and nature while contemplating the nature of time, transience, the ephemeral and entropy. What the subject of my paintings have in common is an emotional remove; a quietness of observation. I hope that the works evoke a sense of awe and the sublime. I am interested in how our experience of the world is mediated by various factors such as time, distance, culture, and technology. My process starts with the photograph, either taken or found. I treat the photo as a sketch, an initial idea from which work can issue. It is a layer, once removed, from the object. I purposely add these layers between myself and the object so that distance and abstraction can emerge and create the opportunity to view and think about the work more slowly and differently to the initial perception.”

Penn’s work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions in South Africa, in Europe and America and is represented in several private and institutional collections around the world, including those of the Ampersand Foundation, the Smithsonian Museum (Washington, D.C.) and The Victoria and Albert Museum (London, U.K). She has been a recipient of the Ampersand Fellowship (New York, 2014) and the Bickerton-Widdowson Trust Memorial Scholarship (New Zealand, 1998). She was a finalist in the Waikato Museum National Contemporary Art Award (New Zealand) in 2019 and 2024. She was a merit award winner in the Parkin Drawing Prize 2022 and is a finalist in the Parkin Drawing Prize 2024.