Notes

Penny Siopis started producing her now famous ‘Cake’ paintings in the early 1980s during her tenure as lecturer at the Technikon Natal (now the Durban University of Technology). It was a time when female artists were rare and female lecturers even rarer. In a male-dominated art world, Siopis pioneered new ways of thinking about oil paint, stressing its corporeal qualities.

Her choice of cakes stemmed from her interest in their role as markers of the passage of time in social rituals, and in the way they are often stereotypically associated with women. Siopis found expression through a particular application of oil paint using culinary icing tools mixed with palette knife technique and by incorporating cake decorations into the physical body of impasto paint. 

The surface of the cake section of this painting is built up into such high relief that it casts its own shadow, a feature complimented by delicately rendered painted shadows.  This sets up a powerful interplay between physical and illusionistic form. Siopis’ remarkable command of palette knife technique combines subtle juxtapositions of flat planes of colour with textured layers created through a pattern of tiny incisions into the impasto surface.

In a review on her 1982 exhibition in Durban, artist and critic Andrew Verster commented on the intensity and passion with which Siopis approached her painting, observing that the artist “paints like her life depends on it” and that “these are clever works…which operate on different levels simultaneously. You can if you choose simply enjoy them as beautiful objects or you can delve into the reasons behind them.”1

Further elaborating on the art historical references evident whilst stressing the artist’s distinctive style, he notes; “We detect too, influences of others, Bonnard’s intimate still-lives where shadows are as real as the objects which cause them, Poliakoff’s angular jig-saw of planes, de Stael, Soutine, the Expressionists and others. But they are only memories, for she has absorbed them and created a style that is patently her own.”

Cake is a classic example of the series, but it is unusual in its particular construction of the impasto dome cake incorporating found objects and the orientation of the dome on the textured surface of the table.  The tilted up perspective that became Siopis’ signature form in her ‘Cake’ paintings evokes a kind of vertigo through formal tensions set up between the large masses of the dome, the table and the surrounding space, suggesting a scene in which the cake is on the verge of collapse. As Siopis has noted, “I’d often mould the paint into a very high relief, so high at times, that the form would collapse”.2

 In the present lot, it seems as if the cake is melting internally like a fondant or molten cake. Similar to another key work in the series Embellishments (1982) in the Wits Art Museum, the plastic cake decorations become part of the organic matter of the paint, appearing to emerge from it - ballerinas, tennis players and cupids are entangled in a chaotic encounter with fleshy pink paint.  But the quiet grey tones of the space surrounding the action gives a formal aura to the whole scene.

1. Andrew Verster. (3 April 1982). ‘Painting for Life’. Natal Daily News.

2. Penny Siopis. (2014) ‘Time and Again’. Johannesburg; Wits University Press 2014, page 53.