Gelah Penn

Gelah Penn, Prologue, Site-responsive installation, various synthetic materials, dimensions variable, 2020.

Gelah Penn (born 1951) is an American visual artist based on the East Coast. She is known for site-responsive installations, three-dimensional drawings and collages that take an unconventional approach to disciplinary boundaries, materials and artistic methods. Her mixed-media, hybrid works are composed of accumulations of disparate materials and calligraphic gesture that respond to and disrupt the architectural spaces in which they are installed. Critics identify three defining aspects of her art: a commitment to non-narrative abstraction; a unifying interest in the language of drawing; and the use of lightweight, everyday synthetic materials like netting, fishing line, plastic bags and vinyl tubing. Critic Ann Landi wrote, "Penn's installations bristle with spiky energy, hugging the walls or colonizing corners, suggesting habitats created by insects with a taste for sci-fi, or abstract line drawings catapulted from two dimensions into three. The works are made from cheap and ordinary stuff ... but assume a busy, restless life, even as their titles hint at something a little more sinister." She has exhibited at those institutions and at SculptureCenter, Smack Mellon and the National Academy Museum, among other venues. After being based in New York, Penn lives and works in northwest Connecticut with her husband, artist-critic Stephen Maine.

Life and career Penn was born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania in 1951, She studied art briefly at Brandeis University, then catalogued early films for the American Film Institute for a year. She appeared in surveys including: "The Persistence of Line" (2008) and "Degrees of Density" (2009, Kentler International Drawing Space); "Drawing Itself" (Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, 2009); "Textility" (Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, 2012); "Materiality: The Matter of Matter" (Center for Maine Contemporary Art, 2017); and "The Stubborn Influence of Painting," (Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, 2021).

Penn's curatorial projects include the exhibitions "Diphthong" (Fiterman Art Center, 2015), "object'hood" (Lesley Heller Gallery, 2015) and "PLACE: Monumental Drawings" (Equity Gallery, 2016).

Work and reception Sculpture critic Patricia Rosoff wrote, "Penn's work embodies essentially Modernist principles: resolutely abstract, it firmly renounces narrative, representation and autobiography." Others identify a similar contradiction between its use of durable (if lightweight) materials and the impermanence of the installations. Her process involves an initial site visit or photographs, followed by rudimentary, exploratory sketches. She then constructs loose, preparatory concentrations of activity in her studio.

Reviewers find diverse connections in Penn's installations, likening them to writing, musical scoring, graffiti or doodling, natural events and organisms. The 40-foot, mostly black installation Clash by Night (2009) was described as a "cocoon" whose spiraling swirls and loops of tubing, netting and shadow converged in a corner. High Tide transformed a skybridge in a Philip Johnson-designed gallery space, creating a dialectic between individual parts and unified whole, and disposable matter and architectural permanence. Prologue was a 33-foot-long work composed of the artist's characteristic materials connected by horizontal linear elements, which moved in a step-like rhythm of quiet progression and busyness along the length of a stairway wall. The "Stele" series (2020) featured cruciform arrangements, ethereal materials and shadows, and a sharp verticality suggesting figural presences. She received a Tree of Life artist grant in 2016 and a Connecticut Artist fellowship in 2017. Her work belongs to the public collections of the Arkansas Arts Center, Brooklyn Museum Library, Cleveland Institute of Art, Columbus Museum and Weatherspoon Art Museum.