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.

Representation Artor Contemporary