Homage to Holbein
Homage to Holbein, Variation #1
2016
12 x 169 x 6 inches
(30 x 429 x 15 cm)
pigmented silicone, hair, polychromed wood
Completed in 1521, Hans Holbein’s painting The Body of Christ in the Tomb stands as one of the finest and most enigmatic paintings of the Northern Renaissance. So striking and uncompromising was it’s stark realist depiction of death and decay (it is said that Holbein used a corpse, pulled from the Rhine river as his subject), that in Dostoyevsky’s 1869 novel The Idiot the character Prince Myshkin declares it to have the power to make the viewer lose his faith. Challenging the norms of representation in its own day, it continues to stand to this day as one most powerful and personalized images in the lexicon of European painting.
Evan Penny’s elongated sculpture, Homage to Holbein (mediated as it is through painting, photography and digital imaging), is an evocative contemporary meditation on life and death from Penny’s perspective within the secular present.
Homage to Holbein, Variation #1
2016
12 x 169 x 6 inches
(30 x 429 x 15 cm)
pigmented silicone, hair, polychromed wood
Homage to Holbein, Variation #1
2016
12 x 169 x 6 inches
(30 x 429 x 15 cm)
pigmented silicone, hair, polychromed wood
Homage to Holbein, Variation #1
2016
12 x 169 x 6 inches
(30 x 429 x 15 cm)
pigmented silicone, hair, polychromed wood
Homage to Holbein, Variation #1
2016
12 x 169 x 6 inches
(30 x 429 x 15 cm)
pigmented silicone, hair, polychromed wood
Homage to Holbein, Variation #1
2016
12 x 169 x 6 inches
(30 x 429 x 15 cm)
pigmented silicone, hair, polychromed wood
Homage to Holbein, Variation #1
2016
12 x 169 x 6 inches
(30 x 429 x 15 cm)
pigmented silicone, hair, polychromed wood
Homage to Holbein, Variation #1
2016
12 x 169 x 6 inches
(30 x 429 x 15 cm)
pigmented silicone, hair, polychromed wood
The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb
(with detail)
by Hans Holbein the Younger