Richard Penn

Richard Penn is a South African artist living and working in Auckland, New Zealand. He has had numerous solo exhibitions at venues including Gallery AOP in Johannesburg, Nirox Gallery in Johannesburg, Blank Projects in Cape Town, The Origins Centre Museum at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and, most recently, at Everard Read/Circa Gallery in Cape Town and Everard Read Gallery Johannesburg.

He has exhibited both locally and internationally and was the South African representative at The Rybon International Artists’ Workshop in Tehran, Iran in 2012. In 2014 he took up the Ampersand Fellowship to New York, USA. He is represented in private, corporate, and academic collections throughout South Africa and internationally and has shown consistently at both Johannesburg and Cape Town Art Fairs. In December 2020 he and his family relocated to New Zealand. His work examines the intersection of scientific and artistic vision, using scale and detail as metaphoric devices to reflect on our invested positions as viewers. Working across various media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, and animation, Penn explores the relationship between visual and conceptual abstraction. More recently he has worked exclusively with clay and ceramics and has been awarded a three-month studio residency at Auckland Studio Potters in 2021.