Penny Siopis (born 5 February 1953) is a South African artist from Cape Town. She was born in Vryburg in the North West province from Greek parents who had moved after inheriting a bakery from Siopis maternal grandfather. Siopis studied Fine Arts at Rhodes University in Makhanda, completing her master's degree in 1976, after which she pursued postgraduate studies at Portsmouth Polytechnic in the United Kingdom. She taught Fine Arts at the Technikon Natal in Durban from 1980 to 1983. In 1984 she took up a lectureship at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. During this time she was also visiting research fellow at the University of Leeds (1992–93) and visiting professor in fine arts at Umeå University in Sweden (2000) as part of an interinstitutional exchange. With an honorary doctorate from Rhodes University, Makhanda – Siopis is currently honorary professor at Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town.
Early years
She came to prominence in the early 1980s with her 'cake' paintings, which materially encode feminist aesthetics in thick impasto oil paint surfaces. These works were followed by her 'history paintings', interpreted as a form of resistance against apartheid. Her interdisciplinary practice since the national liberation of her country has explored the persistence and fragility of memory, notions of truth and the complex entanglements of personal and collective histories. Experimenting with a wide range of materials and processes, she reflects on the politics of the body, grief and shame, estrangement, migration and more recently the relationship between the human and the not-human within the context of climate change. All her explorations assert materiality and process as inseparable from concept, with her characteristic use of contingent and chance-driven methods becoming emblematic of her interest in 'the poetics of vulnerability'. Griselda Pollock states, "Penny Siopis is one of the few artists in the world today who can weave a material web of marks, gestures, voices, words, found things and painted surfaces to entangle the brute forces of history with the delicate threads of human vulnerability".
Work Siopis has established herself as a prominent South African artist through her work across painting, installation, and film. Her practice frequently combines diverse references and materials in ways that challenge disciplinary boundaries and traditional binaries.6.6sFast
Concepts of time run through all her work often manifesting in the actual physical changes of her materials; in her early cake paintings oil paint is made to be unnaturally affected by gravity, age and decay; in her films using archival footage time is marked as much by the effects of age on the celluloid as by the historical period caught in the sweep of the camera; in her accumulations of found objects in her installations, ideas of the heirloom come to the fore with her ongoing conceptual work Will (1997 – ) – in which she bequeaths objects to beneficiaries – being the ultimate time piece only becoming complete on her death; her glue and ink paintings index flux as they record the material transformation that happens when viscous glue matter reacts with pigment, gravity, the artist's bodily gestures, and the drying effects of the air.
Siopis sees her art practice as 'open form', operating as an intimate model in which the physical changes of her materials can be extrapolated into a larger ethics of personal and political transformation. According to Achille Mbembe, this quality marks her interest in process as a perpetual state of becoming and entails "the crafting of an unstable relation between form and formlessness, in the understanding that the process of becoming proceeds in ways that are almost always unpredictable and at times accidental"
Paintings
"From the outset, her attitude to painting has been simultaneously modernist and counter-modernist in its complex irreverence to the purity of both creative act and the physical medium."Richards, Colin, 'Prima Facie_Surface and Depth in the Work of Penny Siopis' in 'Penny Siopis' ed Kathryn Smith, Johannesburg, 2005, p. 35
Cake paintings
Between 1980 and 1984 Siopis developed her 'cake' paintings. Using unconventional implements such as piping nozzles and other cake decorating tools to make her high relief impasto paintings Siopis explored the materiality of oil paint, its potential as object and its association with traditional representations of the female body. The excessive impasto surface changes over time with the outside layer of drying long before the interior, leading the surface to wrinkle and crack. This becomes a metaphor for the all too real effects of time and circumstance on the body. Siopis challenges western conventions of the idealisation of female flesh and beauty.Penny Siopis in Gerrit Olivier (ed) Penny Siopis: Time and Again, Wits University Press: Johannesburg, 2014 While the female body is the main focus of these works, their association with food and decay comments on larger social narratives of decay which are developed in the paintings that follow. Working with lived experiences alongside feminist theories Siopis expresses how she "was interested in working within the space of complexity and as I worked the materiality became the critical thing" Penny Siopis in Gerrit Olivier (ed) Penny Siopis: Time and Again, Wits University Press: Johannesburg, 2014, 53
History paintings
Between 1985 and 1995 Penny Siopis produced a body of work often referred to as her 'history paintings'. Although her interest in the materiality of paint and her experimentation with this medium never ceased, the works from this period differed in many important ways from the 'cake' paintings. The transition was already marked in her Still Life with Watermelon and Other Things (1985); it was even more clearly evident in Melancholia (1986). Presenting a vision of colonialism in decline, the scene in Melancholia is both a vanitas and a history painting. It combines symbols of European high culture and references to Africa, all of them piling up as the debris of history within a claustrophobic space that signifies excess, ruin and psychological malaise. In the past the genre of history painting was seen as the highest achievement of the European art historical tradition. Siopis' ironic interrogation of its form and ideology is evident in such works as Patience on a Monument: 'A History Painting''' (1988).
In the history works she introduced the techniques of collage and assemblage as a means to disrupt direct depiction and to bring in references to the representations of colonial history that South Africans were brought up on through history books. These techniques also allowed her to mark the significance of objects as traces of history in their own right. Through the introduction of objects and found images her works challenged the invisible but powerful structures within the ideological systems of apartheid at a time when political tensions in the country were running high.
Paintings with reference to historical events
Pinky Pinky
The 2001–2004 series is the visualization of a South African urban legend Pinky Pinky. A hybrid creature of amalgamated forms. Half-human, half-animal, bi-gendered creature of indeterminate race, Pinky Pinky preys on school children in toilets and threatens girls in pink underwear. Siopis embarked on a personal exploration of Pinky Pinky, and according to verbal accounts by schoolchildren she interviewed on the topic, produced visual embodiments of this processual hybrid figure of no stable identity. Furthering a practice in manipulating paint and form to simulate skin and flesh, Siopis allows the paint to stand in as object of unspeakability. Located within Freudian theory and Lacan's 'real', Siopis explores humans' ability to work-through personal feelings that exceed language by projecting things you cannot do in real life, onto and within fiction, myth and fantasy.Penny Siopis in Gerrit Olivier (ed) Penny Siopis: Time and Again, Wits University Press: Johannesburg, 2014, 139
In her visualisation of Pinky Pinky, Siopis inserted various human prosthetics into the pink, fleshy paint – plastic body parts like eyes and fake eye lashes; teeth and finger nails. In these 'fake horrors', Siopis allows viewers to feel both connected to and distanced from their own fears. In a 2004 interview with Sipho Mdanda, Siopis writes how "Many of these prosthetics are "traditionally" flesh colour, a kind of dirty pink. There is irony here, as flesh colour is not just a category of colour, but nothing less than a western conceit in which whiteness (pink) becomes the universal colour for flesh".Penny Siopis in an interview with Sipho Mdanda referenced in Red: The Iconography of Colour in the Work of Penny Siopis, ed Brenton Maart, Exhibition catalogue. Durban: KZNSA Gallery, 2009, p20 The series investigates personal and public narratives around fear and trauma in South Africa. It is an allegory of the nation's deepest fears around issues of poverty, xenophobia, race, and crime at a time of radical social transition and uncertainty post-1994.
Siopis states : "As much as Pinky Pinky is a perpetrator of violence, it also seems a victim of, and scapegoat for, violent, uncivil actions – a constructed 'something' to blame for social problems."Duiker, Sello; Koloane, David; Kroner, Magdalena; Martin, Marilyn, New Identities: Contemporary Art From South Africa, Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2005
Shame paintings
Siopis produced the Shame paintings between 2002 and 2005 in the wake of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission Dineo Gqola, Pumla, "Penny Siopis on confronting shame", New Frame, 2021 whilst exploring the public and psychological state of shame. The series of mixed-media paintings, show the artist's manipulation of thick, lacquer gel paint, used in home-craft to create stained glass and coloured mirror effects on surfaces. The ready-made rubber stamped messages within the paintings show the role of a language and the 'unspeakable' nature of the feeling imbued within the painting process.
Works from the series were first shown in 2003 at solo exhibitions in Johannesburg and Athens. In 2005 the Shame paintings became a key feature of Siopis' multi-media installation titled Three Essays on Shame at the museum of Sigmund Freud, once his house, in London[8.33]. Responding to Freud's publication Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, of which the 2005 project marked the centenary, Siopis' Shame installation "linked the issues of sexuality and shame to the traumatic history of her country".Pollock, Griselda, ‘Remembering 3 Essays on Shame’ in Penny Siopis: Time & Again, 2014, p169 By inserting references (voice recordings and objects) into the space, the work evoked a dialogue between Freud's ideas and various individual experiences during the proceedings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, binding the traces of human vulnerability and the dramatic effects of sweeping historical narratives. Consisting of three parts located in Freud's study, dining room and bedroom, the rooms were transformed to exhibit Siopis' installations titled Voice, Gesture and Memory – a frieze of the small paintings installed around Freud's deathbed.