Penny Siopis

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. Quotes 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. Retrieved 26 March 2025. I believe that encounters with lively matter can chasten my fantasies of human mastery, highlight the common materiality of all that is, expose a wider distribution of agency and reshape the self and its interests Bennet, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, Duke University Press, 2010, p122. Retrieved 26 March 2025. I was always interested in objects as carriers of meanings beyond themselves, they are physical traces of time, of people's lives and social histories, like an archive, which I use similarly to how I use film...its an ephemeral art really. The objects get taken down and become like paint tubes again. The constant evolution of the installations and the meanings made from them functions as a generative force in Siopis's work. One thing nestled next to another or dropped over another, creating countless relationships. They're endless these bits of relationships between things and objects and spaces". Penny Siopis in Gerrit Olivier, Penny Siopis:Time and Again, Wits University Press, Johannesburg 2014 pg 110/111. Retrieved 26 March 2025. The material process of the paintings is a fluid affair; the glue’s capacity to change its form and colour when it comes into contact with other forces – air, gravity, water, my gestures – imbues it with a presence that holds onto itself as ‘something other’, yet can simultaneously take on the guise of an image. With global warming, what do we imagine? Burning? Drowning? Absolute alterity? And what forms – or formlessnesses – do we imagine this through? Siopis, Penny. "Warm Water Imaginaries". Stevenson. Retrieved 26 March 2025. You’re not just painting or making work about the empirical changes that you witness, but actually the psychological changes. I think people in the larger world are very interested in South Africa being a kind of microcosm of social-political experiences across the globe, but they often don’t have the sense of what it is: the psychological complexity of what it might mean to have lived in a society like ours, and still live in a society like ours. We’re often afraid of change. It always amazed me when people said under apartheid, ‘Oh, we can’t change overnight.’ Well, what the pandemic has said is yes, you change overnight: you can, we all do, it’s possible. And this is the global change. I embrace change, and I think my medium, the way I work with the medium, somehow gives a physical form to that embrace. Artist Interview: Penny Siopis – Shame, Or Pictures Of Perplexity BRUCEDENNILL, (4 October 2021) Quotes About Her "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". Pollock, Griselda (2014). 'Remembering Three Essays on Shame, Penny Siopis Freud Museum, London 2005' in Penny Siopis:Time and Again. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. p. 172. ISBN 978-1-86814-695-6.Retrieved 26 March 2025. "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 "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. Retrieved 26 March 2025. "Sopis's Will is the ultimate time piece...We are able to glance back on a life-in-formation and recognize the subject as discursively produced, 'as project, something to be built'' Jennifer Law, ‘The Artist’s Will’ in Gerrit Oliver (ed), Penny Siopis:Time and Again Wits University Press: Johannesburg, 2014 pg 136 Retrieved 26 March 2025. External Links Category:Artists from South Africa Category:Film producers from South Africa Category:Installation artists Category:Women from South Africa Category:Women artists Category:1953 births Category:Living people Category:Women born in the 1950s