It was a grand start for Dutch metal sculptor, 42-year-old Joshua Pennings, when 2,000 people in Vladivostok came to see his world of powerful animals and fantasy figures, all hand fired and molded from metal.
Pennings’s exhibition was part of a week-long cultural festival coinciding with the Jetski World Offshore Championship event that ran from Aug. 10–18 in this remote eastern region of Russia.
Over the week of the exhibition, 20,000 people flocked to see his lifelike depictions of animals forged from thick Core-Ten steel and reused metal parts.
A Brabants man from the medieval town of Grave in southern Netherlands, Pennings first trained in graphic design. It was when he wanted to change the shape and style of his Japanese motorbike that, without any training in metal working, he made the jump into the world of shaping metal.
“Work seemed to come natural to me. I did not have to fight to create shapes that had a sense of life,” said Pennings at our first meeting when his eclectic mix of real and fantasy creatures were on display at a local village arts centre.
“There seemed to come about a sense of harmony transforming cold metal into warm sculptures,” he said.
With many of his pieces featuring salvaged machine parts, his work has a primeval quality. Over the past three years his back-to-basics works have been shown in many Dutch art galleries as well as being displayed in art fairs in France, Germany, Belgium, and an arts and metal symposium in Mladá Boleslav, Czech Republic, with private collectors extending worldwide.
In Vladivostok, 20 of his animals and figures were on display, together with the sci-fi paintings of his close friend, the Belgian artist Jef Bertels. In a gesture of thanks to his Russian hosts, Pennings fabricated two prizes for the winners of the Jetski Offshore Championship in the form of vibrant flying figures. His sculpture of a dragon will also remain in the main park of the city.
From the smooth golden metal fuselage giving speed and grace to his motorbike, to birds, dragons, and fish, Pennings’s metal sculptures have moved into the public arena. In 2011, together with Juul Baltussen, he created a children’s play sculpture in the form of a giant fish for the town of Blerick, close to the river Maas in southeastern Netherlands.
Here his playfulness was given over to a piece of public sculpture where children are able to express their own inner worlds, and older folk can sit and wonder about the time when they landed the biggest fish ever.
Unluckily for Pennings, prior to his travel to eastern Russia, his leg was badly broken when a stack of metal plates fell across him. His leg needed metal pins and he had to travel to his exhibition with his leg encased in a special cast.
This accident has delayed his work on a 5-meter-high metal artwork to be erected in front of a new building for Rabobank in the Dutch town of Boxmeer.
Based on the plans and form-work for this commission, won in a competition, Pennings’s vision for the Rabobank sculpture should take his work to a new dimension for a man who has been able to bring his intrinsic skill in graphic art into the realm of fabricating with metal.
More of Joshua’s work can be viewed at http://www.joshuapennings.com
Netherlands-based Bill Holdsworth is an architectural engineer who for 20 years had an art gallery as part of his design atelier in St Albans, U.K. In the 1960s he was the co-founder of U.K.-wide arts movement Centre 42. He has designed the comfort conditions for art galleries and as a writer and journalist, written as an art critic.
