oil and egg wash on paper

Artwork date: 2003
Signature details: each signed and dated on the reverse; each inscribed with the artist's name, date, medium and dimensions on a Goodman Gallery label adhered to the reverse
Literature: Smith, K. (2005). Penny Siopis. Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery Editions, where the painting on the right is reproduced on p.158.

(1)

14.5 x 20.5 cm each; framed size: 20 x 148.5 x 4.5 cm

Provenance:

Private collection, Johannesburg.

Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg.

Notes:

Penny Siopis was born in 1953 in Vryburg, South Africa, and lives in Cape Town. She has an MFA and an Honorary Doctorate from Rhodes University, and is currently an Honorary Professor at Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. Her work since the early 1980s has encompassed painting, film/ video, photography and installation. All of her explorations, whether with body politics, memory, migration, or the relations between the human and non-human, are characterised by her interest in what she calls the ‘poetics of vulnerability’ – embodied in the dynamic play between materiality and reference, chance and contingency, form and formlessness, personal and collective history.

Solo exhibitions include Moving Stories and Travelling Rhythms: Penny Siopis and the many journeys of Skokiaan, National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Bulawayo (2019); ‘This is a True Story’: Six Films (1997-2017), a survey of Siopis’ film works, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town (2018); Penny Siopis: Films, Erg Gallery, Brussels (2016); Incarnations, ICA Indian Ocean, Mauritius (2016); and Time and Again: A Retrospective Exhibition, South African National Gallery, Cape Town (2014), and Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg (2015).

Siopis has held eight solo exhibitions at Stevenson in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Amsterdam (2007-2020). Penny Siopis provides the following insights into her Shame paintings: The process of creating and clarifying imagery is important here. Many of the paintings began as Rorschach-type ‘blots’, as formless splashes, drips and drags of coloured liquid that runs, pools and ultimately congeals.

This raw matter is profoundly suggestive, and allows the thoughts and feeling pressing against my consciousness a medium and a venue for unfolding and playing out. Paint has - for me at least - always operated as a physical emanation of entangled or indivisible thoughts and feelings. The work always becomes a carnal document, so to speak. It is not for nothing that these are paintings, not photographs or another kind of image process which I may well use elsewhere in my work. Painting gives me something primary, an elemental state, process, vision. In a way this almost amorphous, liquid process produces the conditions for figuring unspeakable things and speakable things buried under taboo …[1]

[1] Siopis, P. ‘Three essays on Shame: The Artist’s View’, p.20. Quoted in Griselda Pollock, Remembering Three Essays on Shame, Penny Siopis, Freud Museum, London 2005. In Gerrit Olivier (ed.). Penny Siopis: Time and Again, (2014). Wits University Press, p.172.