Strauss & co - 15 February 2020, Cape Town

84  ROBYN PENN SOUTH AFRICAN 1973– Cloud oil on canvas 100,5 by 100,5cm R20 000 – 30 000 Penn’s fixation on climate change has had a great influence on her works, as evidenced by her 2017 exhibition Paradise Lost at the Barnard Gallery. Here she focuses on the cloud as a symbol of the crisis because it is “one of the most difficult variables to measure and predict within the science of climate change.” 1 Penn’s clouds represent the uncertainty of the future of the environment; they are “like a strange phantom in uncanny stillness… weighty with an undeniable sense of foreboding and disquiet, a nebulousness that is psychological as well as physical.” 2 The cloud in the present lot is reminiscent of a sensuous human form, with its soft edges and pink tinges. Penn has created juxtapositions that are “a series of powerful dichotomies: phenomenological and corporeal, sensorial and cerebral, tangible and intangible.” 3 1. Barnard Gallery (2017) Robyn Penn: Paradise Lost , [Online], Available: https://barnardgallery. com/exhibitions/27/ [3 December, 2019] 2.  Ibid. 3.  Ibid . 102