relief oil on board

Artwork date: c.1979/80
Exhibited: Jack Heath Gallery, University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, Penny Siopis and Peter Schütz, 1981.

(1)

55.5 x 76 cm

Notes:

Although well known for her videos and installations, Penny Siopis is foremost a painter. As an artist who has consistently engaged with South Africa’s fraught social and political life, her central concerns are with the physicality of paint, the accumulation of found objects (including video footage), material memory, and the politics of embodiment. Siopis was born to Greek parents in Vryburg, a small town in the Northern Cape to which her parents migrated after inheriting a bakery from her maternal grandfather. The childhood experience of watching her mother icing cakes in the family bakery was to have direct biographical bearing on the making of her Cake paintings.

Siopis studied Fine Arts at Rhodes University, before pursuing postgraduate studies at Portsmouth Polytechnic in England. Cakes was painted in 1979/80 just after she’d returned to take up a lecturing position at what was then Natal Technikon, Durban. It is one of the first of her Cake paintings (1980 to 1984), and anticipates Queen Cakes (1982), shown as part of her retrospective, Time and Again, at Iziko South African National Gallery and at the Wits Museum of Art in 2014/15.

‘It represents an early example of my interest in materiality as concept, form defined as much through the relief surface as by colour and composition,’ writes Siopis. ‘The little stipples in the pink field were created by perforating – with the tip of my palette knife – a thick layer of wet paint. The ruptured surface picks up ambient light creating an actual physical texture, rather than one shaped through more conventional illusionistic or expressive rendering. Oil paint’s associations with the body (forming skins, changing over time, ageing...) are stressed by the work’s “feminine” morphology, an element that was to become a critical concern of the Cake paintings.’

Painted a few years later, Pedestal evokes the psycho-social tensions of living in South Africa in the early 1980s – the oppressive sense of Calvinist repression and rectitude conveyed by the pulpit is offset by the tempting creaminess and fleshy pinkness of the slice of cake. So frowned upon was sensuality that even the raw wood of the pulpit is painted in grey and cloaked in a decorative white cloth. By contrast, the fleshy innards of the cake are lasciviously exposed. The slice faces the viewer directly, as if beckoning to be eaten…

Alexandra Dodd

Sources:

Siopis, P. (2016) Penny Siopis Cake paintings. [email].

NLA Design and Visual Arts (2013). Penny Siopis. [online] Available at: https://nladesignvisual.wordpress.com/2013/08/03/penny-siopis/. [Accessed: 26 Aug. 2016].

South African History Online (2016). Penny Siopis. [online] Available at: http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/penny-siopis. [Accessed: 26 Aug. 2016].