About

God’s Away on Business brings together two new bodies of work that are strikingly different in content and execution, but come from the same critical view of global current affairs. Borrowing the title of the exhibition from a Tom Waits song, Penn invokes Waits’s leaden pessimism (“It’s all over, it’s all over, it’s all over”), but reminds us that in the midst of crisis and collapse, there can be lightness, humour, and sublime beauty.

It is this notion of the sublime that Penn uses to guide us into her work. The concept has circulated in different cultures since ancient times, but its …