ROBYN DENNY

Robyn Denny is a painter and video artist whose powerful multimedia installations are internationally recognised. Their energy is a creative catharsis born of intensely opposing forces. Denny’s most recent work, Traces of Untold Stories, explores tension arcs from colonial trauma to contemporary renewal with a haunting video installation, video stills, and large ink paintings.

Similarly, Indigo – Passage to Healing (AKAA Paris) and Eastcoast Gold (Berman Contemporary) are rooted in violent historical encounters. The ancestral echo of global movements of peoples during the so-called Age of Discovery.

Deep engagement with her colonial era subjects in these series compelled Denny in her process. Their contemporary pathos derives from the charnel grounds whence terrible beauty bursts through.

Hatched 2015 (LOOP Barcelona) – Denny’s first cross-disciplinary collaboration with Mamela Nyamza – showcases the artist’s versatility. The series’ dynamically expressive inks play off Denny’s short film of Nyamza’s originally conceived dance performance.

The artist and the dancer worked together to create an immersive experience, as with Indigo – Passage to Healing and Eastcoast Gold for which they threaded in live performance, rendering South African, Spanish and Parisian audiences confronted but profoundly moved.

From Denny’s early co-curation of JUNCTURE with her 4 screen video Earth, Air, Fire and Water through to her take-over of the underground floor of The Hudson building – emptied to make way for a cavernous installation of subterranean darkness pierced by vaults of light, in Large Black Inks – Denny has continued to combine video art with painting to create viscerally compelling installations.

Denny’s art draws us in to a sense of shared humanity.