James Penfold, a British stencil artist who works as Penny, is offering a £1 million ($1.2 million) reward for information to recover his laptop and hard drive containing hundreds of artwork stolen from his East London home on March 17.
Penfold returned from a day trip with his family to find his MacBook Pro, Samsung external hard drive, cash, jewelry and various other valuables missing. As Penfold informed his followers on Instagram: “My work was not properly saved in the cloud and I lost so much work that I can hardly dare imagine.”
Among the many works Penfold lost is Batman, an unfinished composite portrait of the DC Comics hero created from hundreds of bat images he planned to hand-cut into stencils and superimpose on an uncut sheet of US dollar bills. This was a private commission and will have to be completely redone. Also missing are a pair of generative NFT projects and files linked to a Web3 project.
Penny, Takeover (2022)
Theft is a cruel irony for Penfold, who gave up a career as a neurosurgeon to become an artist, given that his work frequently plays with and subverts themes of theft and the nature of money. Using her hands and a scalpel, Penny specializes in creating provocative, highly detailed pieces that often take the banknote as their canvas.
In 2014 Heistfor example, a thief wearing a balaclava escapes from a £10 note after stealing the Queen’s portrait and in 2013 Money to burn, Lady Liberty sets fire to a dollar bill. In her more recent series “Inflation”, Penny cuts banknotes into thousands of squares, then reshapes the image for a distorting effect.
“I would be willing to offer a million pounds for the safe return of my files and my laptop,” Penfold said in a statement. “The hard drive is probably in a dumpster or pawn shop somewhere, because it really isn’t worth anything to anyone else, but it’s priceless to me and my family.” It’s literally like they stole a part of me.
Penny is currently participating in a solo exhibition at the Krause Gallery in New York and several self-funded short-lived exhibitions in London, although much of the artwork and plans for these are on the missing hard drive.
Penny, Cuts, (2015).
At the time of writing this report, no progress had been made in recovering the stolen items. Anyone with information relating to the case should report it to UK police, quoting CAD number 1397/17MAR23.
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