Slewe Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition alphabet and melody by the Dutch artist Lon Pennock (1945-2020). His powerful oeuvre includes large, monumental abstract sculptures in Corten steel. They can be found in various places in public space in the Netherlands and Germany, including on Blaak in Rotterdam (The River, 1984), on Stadhouderslaan in The Hague (Balance of Sheets, 1980) and in the Plantage park in Schiedam (Antipode, 2007). The exhibition at the gallery presents some smaller and middle-sized sculptures, giving an overview of the last three decades, as well as works on paper, some collages and screen prints. The exhibition opens on Saturday October 16 and will run until November 13.
Pennock’s works are made of steel. Both his small and large abstract sculptures look stunningly simple thanks to his use of a few basic geometric forms, such as blocks, sheets, rods, and spheres. These forms are welded into abstract compositions, as if it had been found by chance, playing with the sculptural principles of weight, rhythm, and mass. Most titles of his sculptures, like Balance, Stack, Bridge, Wall, Gate, refer to these basic sculptural themes.
Pennock was born in 1945 in The Hague. After his study at the Koninklijke Academie voor Kunst en Vormgeving in The Hague and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the sixties, he soon moved away from his traditional figurative practice towards a more abstract, and minimal sculpture. He became known for his large outdoor minimal Corten steel sculptures that can be found in Rotterdam, Schiedam, The Hague, and Amsterdam, among others. His work has been shown and collected internationally by both private and public collections. From 1979 to 1990 he was also director of the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. He lived and worked alternately in The Hague and Nettersheim in Germany. After a short illness he died in Spring 2020.
In 2019 Slewe Gallery already showed a series of small works by him. A recent interview with him about his work by art critic Robert van Altena can be heard on the gallery’s website.