Purple Diary
[October 10 2024]
“Bad Behavior” solo exhibition by Sam Penn at Balice Hertling Paris, on view until November 16th
Inspired by Mary Gaitskill’s stories, Penn arranges portraits, landscapes, and body close-ups to explore themes of love, loss, and desire. The images form a fragmented narrative, reflecting the emotional decay of one relationship and the start of another. With a haunting, dreamlike quality reminiscent of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”, Penn’s work conveys both presence and absence, intimacy and distance. Accompanied by her zine expanding on these themes, the exhibition is a poetic study of the fleeting, yet enduring, nature of human connection.
