Louis K. Meisel Gallery is proud to announce Small Town Meditations, the gallery’s first solo exhibition of Rod Penner on the occasion of a career survey book, Rod Penner, Paintings 1987-2022 from the Artist Book Foundation. The exhibition includes a selection of paintings that span the artist’s three-decade career, as well as recent works.

A Texas-based artist, Penner’s realist works depict the open, empty towns of the American Southwest. Blurring the line between nostalgia and reality, his highly-detailed paintings possess a cinematic quality that elevate the work beyond mere landscapes. Each painting is an exploration of the subtle synchrony of decay and joy that often punctuates landscapes across rural America.

Born in Canada, Penner was raised in the farmlands of British Columbia. Now a resident of the Texas Hill country, he has spent an inordinate amount of time driving through the hills and flatlands of Texas and New Mexico in search of towns, houses, and buildings to photograph, and later paint. Once a subject has been located, he will often return to that locale to document the shifting light at various times of day and changing weather conditions. These photographs become the basis for his paintings, which are all completed by hand over the course of many months.

Rod Penner (b. 1965, Vancouver, Canada) is a Texas-based artist who has spent the past three decades documenting forgotten landscapes in small Texan towns. Working in acrylic, Penner’s subjects vary from desolate Main Streets to imagery of forlorn aluminum-clad ranch houses. Penner’s work has been exhibited internationally and is included in the permanent collections of the Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK, the Flint Institute of Art, Flint, MI, and the Virlane Foundation in New Orleans. Penner studied at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in B.C. and earned his B.A. from Oral Roberts University in 1986.

Exhibition Date: March 18, 2023 - April 29, 2023

Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10 am - 5 pm

Location: Louis K. Meisel Gallery Coordinates

141 Prince Street, Ground Floor, New York, NY 10012

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