Penny Siopis - For Dear Life

Penny Siopis, For Dear Life - a Retrospective 

at EMST (National Museum of Contemporary Art), Athens.

This exhibition is part of the What If Women Rule the World initiative at EMST. It was furthermore the second time this summer when I asked myself: 'why have I not heard of this artist before? Why have I not seen any of her work before?' 

It was such a pleasure walking around the huge space in the basement where the exhibition is laid out, looking at everything. I have not included everything in this post. I have decided to write about Will in a separate post. I have not included any of her video work. I do not have the patience to watch videos but the one that is centred around Miki Theodorakis'     Mounthausen I watched three times. It's just as well I was on my own in the viewing room because I howled while watching it. I can't remember having ever watched anything so moving and at the same time so well made. I might do something with it at a later date.

For 50 years Siopsis has explored the politics of the body, grief and shame as they play out in her home country, South Africa. In the process she has established herself as one of the most important voices of her generation on the African continent and beyond.

Born in South Africa in 1953 to Greek parents, Siopis came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s with her historically and culturally charged paintings that are a fierce critique against colonialism, apartheid, racism and sexism. She went on to experiment with other media such as installation and film, creating a rich, incisive and poignant body of work that has consistently engaged with the persistence and fragility of memory; notions of truth and accountability; the rights of women and the disenfranchised; the issue of vulnerability; and the complex entanglements of personal and collective histories.

The History paintings:

Siopsis made her History Paintings in the mid-1980s to early 1990s, when the South African government clamped down on resistance to apartheid. These allegorical paintings comment on the situation through reference ot the grand tradition of European history painting. Their tilted perspective, heavy impasto and over-abundance of pictorial signs throws up history as a pile of debris set in a claustrophobic pictorial space laid waste by exploitation. 

Melancholia, 1986, (oil on canvas)

Melacholia is a baroque allegory of colonialism in decline, a comment on white greed in the face of black dispossession under apartheid. 

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Piling Wreckage upon Wreckage, 1989, (oil on canvas)

Piling Wreckage Upon Wreckage shows a young woman dwarfed by a flood of debris that lies before her, and to which she holds a cloth. It's title is taken from Walter Benjamin's Thesis on the Philosophy of History. 

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Patience on a Monument: 'A History Painting', 1968, (oil on canvas)

Siopsis also referenced Benjamin's words on history in this painting Patience on a Monument: A History Painting, substituting 'he' with 'she'. 'Where we perceive a chain of events, she sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of her feet... The storm irresistibly propels her into the future to which her back is turned, while the pile of debris before her grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress'. 

In this work, a black woman sits on a pile of western cultural debris. Her position and the classical drapery revealing her breast allude to heroic imagery in European history painting epitomised in Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People. At the same time her posture and the act of peeling a lemon are anti-heroic. The landscape around her is constructed from collaged illustrations torn and photocopied from old history text books presenting the colonial point of view on South Africa's past - they are full of stereotypes of the coloniser and the colonised. The excessive layering of information counters the sense of order that dominant narratives of history usually claim.

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Restless Republic: Groundswell, 2017, (newspaper cuttings, glue, ink and found object on canvas)

Over the last decade Siopis has combined found objects and texts from current newspapers in her process of painting with glue and ink.

In this work, cuttings from South African newspapers reporting on gender-based violence and femicide are shaped into an anti-monumental figure on a plinth. Phrases merge into each other but some are legible, such as 'Rise Up'. The texts are embedded in the glue, becoming cast in its organic and unruly patterns, some of which evoke the veins of a stone. An actual stone is wedged between the painting and the floor, calling to mind the phrase from resistance politics in South Africa, 'You strike a woman, you strike a rock'.

Charmed Lives, 1998-99, (installation of found objects)

This work emerged out of Reconnaissance 1900-1997, a floor installation Siopis had created. The dates 1900-1997 in Reconnaissance reflect the idea that a person's memory covers a hundred years because one inherits the memories of people of no more than two to four generations who come before you. It was inspired by the artist having to pack up her mother's life possessions after an accident which resulted in her being moved into a managed care facility. What to keep and what to throw away; and the impossibility to contain life in categories. Those possessions included objects that came down from Siopis' grandmother carrying with them traces of time, of people's lives and of social histories spanning several generations and continents.

Siopis has said, 'for me art seems always about the unfinished, the incomplete, the unsettled and the fragmentary. Charmed Lives is like an evergrowing, uncontrolled sort of encyclopedia of social and intimate relations. Some of its objects have been singled out to live in my forever unfinished Will work'. (there will be a post on Will).

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History Lesson, 1990, (pages from South African history books)

Pages from apartheid-era South African history textbooks are combined with a pictogram shaped by identical photographs of the artist as a child performing in a school concert. She appears to dance on the white male history that frames her. 

Notes on Grief, 2013-2016, (glue, ink and oil on paper)

Wringing Hands, 2002, (oil and acrylic on canvas)

Stranger, 2008, (glue and ink on paper)

Alongside her large canvases in glue and ink, Siopis worked with glue and ink on small paintings on paper, often in series. Here she draws on references from Greek antiquity and historical photographs to allude to how images of the past might help to look at the refugee situation in Greece.

Cake Paintings:

The Cake Paintings were her first major series. Here, oil paint became an object in its own right, and she associated the medium with flesh and skin. Using unorthodox tools, including cake icing implements, she modelled thick impasto surfaces into high relief. As she has said, 'as a child I'd watch my mother ice cakes, fascinated by how she transformed amorphous lumps of icing paste into things of beauty, gently guiding the material through decorative piping nozzles'.

The sexual morphology that emerged from the process calls into question traditions of the female nude linked to smooth surfaces and the possessive male gaze, as well as countering modernist values in (male) painting, with gender pushing through formalist flatness. Thick paint dramatically marks its own material change as it ages. The outside 'skin' dries long before the interior so the surface wrinkles and cracks. 

Tapers, 1982, (oil and candles on canvas)





Column Cake, 1982, (oil and found objects on wooden base)

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Embelishments, 1982, (oil and found objects on canvas)

In Embelishments, plastic cake decorations press into paint mounds and tangle in its tendrils made with piping nozzles.  Lace forms in curvaceous expanses on the composition, wrought by the artist's circular gestures on the wet layer of paint with the 'wrong end' of the brush. 

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Pinky Pinky, 2002 (oil and found objects):

Pinky Pinky is an urban legend that surfaced after the demise of apartheid in South Africa, a kind of bogeyman who terrorises schoolchildren, especially girls, when they to go the bathroom. As an imaginary entity it allows us to  project current states of fear and moral panics. Things such as anxiety about sexual violence, crime, foreigners (xenophobia), poverty, dread diseases and residual white power. 

Siopsis sees this series, based on this urban legend, as offering a way to inhabit the space of 'excited fright' that we associate with childhood fantasy, a state that is often elicited through encounters with fake 'things' that double as 'real', such as the eyes, fingernails and teeth that the artist incorporates into fleshy pink paint.

Pinky Pinky is a hybrid character, neither black or white, male or female, human or animal, an in-between that avoids any particular categorisation. The colour of the paintings is mostly a dirty pink: the ''flesh colour' of oil paint that marks the Western conceit in which whiteness (pink) becomes the universal colour for flesh. There arre many Pinkys, each a response to schoolchildren's verbal description of the character. Pinky's identity is unstable and changing in every telling.

'For me, Pinky Pinky is a way of giving a narrative form to things that seem impossible to speak about directly. It's a constructed entity onto which we can project psychic states of fear and moral panics in society at large, but more particularly in our post-apartheid moment of radical change', says Siopsis. 'There are full figures, like Who is Pinky Pinky? with a Hannibal Lecter-type mask and little pink plastic babies in a stomach, or the one whose whole body is covered in wounds, and then there are body parts, faces, hands, mouths, feet. The manner in shich they're painted muddles figure and ground distinctions, so that the image appears to be emerging from the pink paint surface'.

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I have to say, I thought these were hilarious. A rare feeling in a gallery.

Glue and Ink Paintings:

Around 2008 Siopis developed her process of working with glue and ink, (which she had previously used in smaller paintings), into a fully-fledged autonomous medium. 

'Experimenting with glue and ink over the years has been vital in working with material as  a concept in painting; how the fiscous glue acts, how it changes from opaque to transparent when exposed to air, how it is affected by gravity when the canvas is placed horizontally on the floor, by the chemical make-up of ink and from my bodily gestures'. 

Three Trees, 2009, (glue and ink on canvas)

The primary image here references a Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock print. 'I am intrigued by Japanese prints of this period. To me their form seems highly conventionalised, and so contrary to the sexual violence they depict. They don't reveal process in direct ways, and so look like elaborate diagrams of experience. They are strange to me and I can't stop looking at them. Because of this they offer me an affective and literal structure for painting, bare bones to give body to. I draw on these prints because of how they resonate now, in our contemporary moment'.

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For Dear Life, 2020, (glue and ink on canvas)

Ambush, 2008, (glue and ink on canvas)

This is reminiscent of Hokusai's famous erotic woodblock print The Dream of a Fisherman's Wife, (1820).

Atlas, 2020-23, (oil and ink on paper)

Began in the artist's apartment during lockdown, these small paintings occupied floors and walls; of equal size and persuasion, they gathered themselves into a grid.

Atlas begins on the floor with the artist  pouring glue and spilling ink. When dry it's tacked to the wall. 

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In a very dark room,  Warm Waters, 2018-2019, (installation/ 84 paintings)

The Warm Waters installation of small paintings on paper was made for a project about rising waters and migration across the Indian Ocean.

The paintings, set slightly away from the wall, make a wave shape, giving the sensation of floating. Imagery emerges from the residues of glue and ink, possessing a material presence which bears the imprints of flux, spilling edges, precarious boundaries often smaking it difficult to determine figures and grounds. 

Shame, 2002-05, (installation/ 182 paintings)

182 small paintings set in a grid. Siopis' Shame series was born because of the shame that was felt during South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the wake of apartheid. 'When shamed, we lose our dignity and integrity in full view of others', writes Siiopis. 'Shame is considered the most visceral of emotions. We die of shame because we feel exposed and sense the terror of being looked at. Shame is born in childhood and revisits us in adult life in ways we cannot control. As much as shame is pain, it also offers the grounds for empathy, encouraging us to recognise shame in others and empathise with situations not immediately our own'.

Describing painting as 'a carnal document', Siopis manipulates thick lacquer gel paint, used in home craft, alongside mirror paint, oil, enamel, glue, watercolour, paper varnish and found objects, to form these intimate 'imaginings of childhood sexuality and dread'. The readymade rubber-stamped messages within the paintings show the role of language, words incarnate. They are frequently repeatedly over-stamped - the motion of the feeling of trauma's unspeakable nature.