Penny SIOPIS (b. 1953)
Pinky Pinky (Eyelash)
2002
oil and found objects on canvas
122 x 152 cm
There are five works by Siopis in the SABC Art Collection: Lessons and The Witness – both made in 1990 during the dark end-days of apartheid, and Blush: Panic, Pinky Pinky (Eyelash) and Chill, mixed-media works made in the early 2000s… Continue Reading
Blush: Panic
2005
mixed media on paper
244 x 112 cm
Legacy
1990
hand coloured etching
edition 3/25
32 x 25 cm
Lessons
1990
hand coloured etching
edition 3/25
74.5 x 54.5 cm
Chill
2004/5
oil and enamel on board
29.5 x 25 cm
The Witness
1990
oil pastel on paper
75 x 54.5 cm
BIOGRAPHY
Penny Siopis was born in the semi-desert town of Vryburg in the Northern Cape. She has exhibited locally and internationally since 1975 and has won a variety of awards including the Volkskas Atelier Award and the Vita Art Now award.
Siopis has an MFA and an Honorary Doctorate from Rhodes University, and is currently an Honorary Professor at Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town. She is represented in South Africa by Stevenson Gallery.
Her work since the early 1980s has encompassed painting, film/video, photography, and installation. All 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 Dear Life, her first retrospective in Europe, at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (2024), 1997 Ongoing at Michaelis Galleries, UCT (2023); Moving Stories and Travelling Rhythms: Penny Siopis and the many journeys of Skokiaan at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Bulawayo (2019); This is a True Story: Six Films (1997 – 2017), a retrospective of her film works at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town (2018); Incarnations at the Institute of Contemporary Art Indian Ocean, Mauritius (2016); Penny Siopis: Films at the Erg Gallery, Brussels (2016); Time and Again: A Retrospective Exhibition at the South African National Gallery, Cape Town (2014), and Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg (2015); Obscure White Messenger at Brandts Museum, Odense, Denmark (2014); Red: The iconography of colour in the work of Penny Siopis at the KZNSA Gallery, Durban (2009); Three Essays on Shame at the Freud Museum, London (2005); and numerous solo exhibitions at Stevenson in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Amsterdam (2007 – 2023).
Siopis has participated in group exhibitions at Tate Modern and the British Museum, London; Kunsthaus Dresden; Beirut Art Centre, Lebanon; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Jeu de Paume and La Maison Rouge, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo; Tennis Palace Art Museum, Helsinki; The Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm/Burlafingen, Germany; and the Hood Museum, New Hampshire, among other institutions; and the biennales of New Orleans, Venice, Taipei, Sydney, Johannesburg, Gwangju, Guangzhou and Havana.
Her work is represented in major public collections in South Africa; international collections include the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and Tate, London.