Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Frontispiece
- Introduction
- 1 Becoming Alive Again
- i Beginnings: Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier
- ii Cake Paintings, History Paintings: Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier
- 2 Historical Delicacies
- iii Installation and Collection: Penny Siopis in Conversation With Gerrit Olivier
- 3 The Artist's Will
- iv Figuring the Unspeakable: Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier
- 4 Remembering Three Essays on Shame, Penny Siopis, Freud Museum, London 2005
- 5 The Vitality of Matter: Notes on First Form, Surfaces, Intimacy and the Social
- v Video Stories: Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier
- 6 Penny Siopis's Film Fables
- 7 Love and Politics: Sister Aidan Quinlan and the Future We Have Desired
- 8 A Retrospect
- vi Painting on the Edge of Formlessness: Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier
- 9 An Artist's Dance through Medium and Vision
- 10 Penny Siopis: Desire and Disaster in Painting
- vii Time Again: Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier
- Appendix
- References
- Index of Illustrated Works
- Artist Biography
- Exhibitions
- Selected Bibliography
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
10 - Penny Siopis: Desire and Disaster in Painting
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2019
- Frontmatter
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Frontispiece
- Introduction
- 1 Becoming Alive Again
- i Beginnings: Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier
- ii Cake Paintings, History Paintings: Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier
- 2 Historical Delicacies
- iii Installation and Collection: Penny Siopis in Conversation With Gerrit Olivier
- 3 The Artist's Will
- iv Figuring the Unspeakable: Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier
- 4 Remembering Three Essays on Shame, Penny Siopis, Freud Museum, London 2005
- 5 The Vitality of Matter: Notes on First Form, Surfaces, Intimacy and the Social
- v Video Stories: Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier
- 6 Penny Siopis's Film Fables
- 7 Love and Politics: Sister Aidan Quinlan and the Future We Have Desired
- 8 A Retrospect
- vi Painting on the Edge of Formlessness: Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier
- 9 An Artist's Dance through Medium and Vision
- 10 Penny Siopis: Desire and Disaster in Painting
- vii Time Again: Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier
- Appendix
- References
- Index of Illustrated Works
- Artist Biography
- Exhibitions
- Selected Bibliography
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
Summary
Penny Siopis is known for her intense interest in the vicissitudes of desire and materiality engaging estrangement, shame, trauma and vulnerability in different media. Recently, she has worked with a dynamic mix of ink and glue. Using mostly found images, she encourages a ‘figure’ to emerge from a process of chance. For the artist, materiality itself is emphatically as much image and concept as any pictured ‘subject’ might be. Her most recent work shows her constantly pushing figuration to the edge of formlessness in a vital aesthetic of violence and eroticism.
Sister (2009), Family (2009) and Twins (Brothers) (2009) all touch on precarious states of being. Each presents a single or double figure pushed to the edge of non-being. The edge is literally and conceptually crucial in these works. Edges are generated from the play of figure and ground, of surface and air, gravity, and the artist's desire to embrace the energies and resistances of matter on a plane. The edge is never settled, be it of pictured figure or figuration itself.
With edge comes silhouette. In all three works, the image within the silhouette is captive to the distortions of material drag and flow as matter meanders, pools and runs. Liquid ink and glue flows and hardens over the features of the face we might recognize, forming a viscous layer of space in which fragments of image float and fix.
Family and Twins (Brothers) are duets. The merged, congealed, reddened, whitened interior of Family is more traumatic than that of Twins (Brothers). In Family, the figures appear almost as wounds, edging the work into a darker register of beastly beauty. Twins (Brothers) goes in a different direction, that of highly keyed, saturated desire and a certain swirling lightness of being. Here, edges are left over from spills of glue and pigment and the energy of the artist's gesture. All that settles the flaring, swirling substance are the quiet, almost contemplative residues of the faces visible somewhere under the surface.
Sister virtually loses her edges and her silhouette. Here, the pictorial law leaks away as the frozen figure is submerged in the reddened tug of gravity and seeping matter.
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- Information
- Penny SiopisTime and Again, pp. 285 - 288Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2014