Richard Penn is a South African artist  living  and working in Auckland, Aotearoa. He has had numerous solo exhibitions at venues including Gallery AOP in Johannesburg, Nirox Gallery in Johannesburg, Blank Projects  in Cape Town, The Origins Centre Museum at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and, most recently, at Everard Read/Circa Gallery in Cape Town and Everard Read Gallery Johannesburg. He has exhibited both locally and internationally and was the South African representative at The Rybon International Artists’ Workshop in Tehran, Iran in 2012. In 2014 he took up the Ampersand Fellowship to New York, USA. He is represented in private, corporate and academic collections throughout South Africa and internationally and has shown consistently at both Johannesburg and Cape Town Art Fairs. His work examines the intersection of scientific and artistic vision, using scale and detail as metaphoric devices to reflect on our invested positions as viewers. Working across various media, including painting, drawing, sculpture and animation, Penn explores the relationship between visual and conceptual abstraction.

More recently he has worked exclusively with clay and ceramics and was awarded a three month studio residency at Auckland Studio Potters in 2021 as well as a month long residency at Driving Creek Potteries in the Coromandel in February 2022. He has taught sculpture at both the Otago Polytechnic and at Elam School of Fine arts at Auckland University.