At Frieze London, Stevenson (stand G8) presents ‘A Painting Looks’, a mini-survey of work by Penny Siopis, which includes paintings, video, photography, sculpture and installation, spanning close to four decades of her artistic practice.

The booth includes Siopis’ latest video The New Parthenon currently premiering at the Taipei Biennial (until 5 February 2017). Continuing her interest in micro historical narratives Siopis combines old anonymous 8mm home-movie footage with text and sound to meditate on the life a Greek man (her father?) and his experiences of war, migration, otherness and tensions with ‘The West’ in a way that resonates with global concerns today.

Siopis first experimented with found footage and text in My Lovely Day (1997), the film commissioned by Okwui Enwezor for the 2^nd Johannesburg Biennale. Around the same time she was working with found objects and constructing installations in the form of piled debris. This aspect of Siopis’ practice is represented in the booth by a line of objects drawn from her Charmed Lives installation, first shown on Liberated Voices at New York’s Museum for African Art in 1999.

The earliest work in the booth is the paint-as-sculpture Cake Box (1981), which resembles a row of decorated confections-cum-breasts. Beside them, resting on a fluted base, stands Column Cake (1982). This sculpture is made from layer upon layer of accumulated oil paint, and garlanded with cake decorations and small plastic ornaments. Shown on Siopis’ solo exhibition at Johannesburg’s politically radical Market Theatre Gallery in 1983, Column Cake represents a rare example of her ‘cake paintings’ of the early 1980s which attracted critical acclaim for their innovative use of medium and social commentary.

Like a confectioner using icing to decorate cakes, Siopis squeezed oil paint through piping bags to sculpt a material illusionism on the surface of her canvas, creating forms and textures which take after the subjects of their representation. These early experiments with paint-as-matter sparked Siopis’ longstanding inquiry into the tension between materiality and image in painting. In South Africa, the ‘cake paintings’ also held a strong political resonance. During the 1980s an increasing resistance to apartheid was underway, while most white South Africans were living cushioned lives, distanced from the realities of their country. Siopis’ portrayal of excess and grandeur was highly eroticised and the ‘cake paintings’ were seen as a feminist critique of white South African privilege.

Siopis began questioning the post-colonial pre-liberation status of South Africa more directly with a series of ‘history paintings’. These works sought to contest received historical narratives by parodying their imperial conventions. History Lesson (1990), an unusual work from this time, is collaged from pages torn from apartheid-era South African history textbooks, over which Siopis stuck identical photographs of her young self performing in a school concert. The photographs are arranged to mimic the figure’s theatrical pose. Her artificial gesture and returning gaze is evoked in a different way in the later staged photograph Comrade Mother (1994)in which the artist and her son enact a resistance to apartheid’s militarisation of ‘the maternal’.

The Shame paintings (2002-5) were shown in 2005 on Siopis’ Three Essays on Shame exhibition at the Freud Museum in London. These small intense paintings capture emotions of estrangement, shame, trauma and vulnerability through an unorthodox mixing of media, and were among Siopis’ first experiments with glue and ink, a process that she continues to explore.

Siopis’ technique of combining glue and ink has characterised her material and pictorial expressions over the last decade. These paintings are born from a chemical reaction that takes place when Siopis spills ink into viscous glue on the canvas, a phenomenon Siopis engages conceptually as the ‘life’ of the medium. The pigment flows through the glue like a neurological network, its shapes and lines sprawling, bleeding across the surface, until the glue dries, hardens and fixes into an image. This process of making paintings has allowed Siopis to work with a dynamic tension of form and formlessness with a sanguine palette that invokes life and loss, passion and trauma. Matter’s Swerve (2016) recalls a solar explosion; at its core – the source of its energy – rests the head of an infant, from which glows a pair of dark, piercing eyes. At once tragic, violent and beautiful, red energy sweeps across the canvas like flame.

Siopis’ sensual expressions capture intense emotional and psychological realms. The large glue and ink World’s Edge (2010/16) resembles a volcanic mounting of pressure, the lava flowing with gravity towards the canvas centre. Here, in the middle, a head hovers on its side, its eyes staring out through the painting, caught between a rising tide and pinned down by bulbous mass of red burden, large and round like a planet. Smaller canvases in the booth represent Siopis’ interest in the ‘poetics of vulnerability’. In Vital Looks and Spirit Matter (both 2016), a fragile figuration appears from a mass of glue personas vulnerable, yet aware, immersed yet exposed. Their faces white, expressions blank, are like porcelain dolls surrounded by inferno, caught between dimensions.

View a 1980s documentary on the making of Penny Siopis' 'cake paintings' here.

 

Opening hours are Thursday 6 October: Premium Day, 12 – 7pm; Friday 7 October, 12 – 7pm; Saturday 8 October, 12 – 7pm; Sunday 9 October, 12 – 6pm
For details of the fair, see https://frieze.com/fairs/frieze-london