18 Facts About Penny Siopis

Penny Siopis was born on 5 February 1953 and is a South African artist from Cape Town.

Penny Siopis was born in Vryburg in the North West province from Greek parents who had moved after inheriting a bakery from Siopis maternal grandfather.

Penny Siopis taught Fine Arts at the Technikon Natal in Durban from 1980 to 1983.

Penny Siopis came to prominence in the early 1980s with her 'cake' paintings, which materially encode feminist aesthetics in thick impasto oil paint surfaces.

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".

Penny Siopis established herself as one of the most talented and challenging artists in South Africa and beyond, by working across painting, installation and film, bringing together diverse references and materials in ways that disturb disciplinary boundaries and binaries.

Between 1985 and 1995 Penny Siopis produced a body of work often referred to as her 'history paintings'.

Penny 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.

Penny Siopis produced the Shame paintings between 2002 and 2005 in the wake of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission whilst exploring the public and psychological state of shame.

Penny Siopis shows matter to be alive, creating a fluid process in which the medium is an active agent in the making of the work.

Penny Siopis used various modes of making to respond to the vast history of climate change and the complex geological and social present.

Penny Siopis began working with film in 1994 with her film Per Kind Permission: Fieldwork.

However, in 1997 Penny Siopis found her niche in film making through the work My Lovely Day.

Penny Siopis has continued to work with film throughout her career and describes the videos as montages, cut-and-paste images that move and unfold over time.

Penny Siopis combined these with music and the remembered words of her grandmother, presented as subtitles.

Penny Siopis wove the story of three generations of women, as a kind of transgenerational haunting.

Penny Siopis has a huge archive of found film that she mines continually.

Penny Siopis sees the film as a ready-made in that it brings its own history and context into the scene.