Notes

In the early 1980s, while teaching fine art in Durban, Siopis began work on a series of paintings depicting cakes and confections displayed in unusual perspective on tables, often with lace settings. This early Lot from 1982 is somewhat unusual for its hovering, casually photographic vantage – typically Siopis depicted her subjects frontally – but in broad terms it is also typical. All Siopis’s ‘cake paintings’ are at once illusionistic representations of domestic opulence – in the tradition of Dutch and Flemish still lifes – and energised sites of material experiment. Siopis, who grew up in Vryburg in the Northern Cape, drew on her experiences in the family bakery to produce her richly textured paintings. After laying down her ground with a palette knife, Siopis used cake-icing instruments (like decorative nozzles) to describe and embellish her sexualised confections. The material sensuality and excess that resulted is key to the criticality of the series. “Provocatively displayed, Siopis’s fetish-like treats bemoan the loss of youthful feminine innocence. Cakes are split open like vaginas, cherry-topped éclairs and queen cakes resemble disembodied breasts, and a cream-horn pastry becomes a phallus,” notes art historian Jennifer Law. “Siopis’s genre paintings are not innocent, and they are certainly not still. The surfaces of her paintings seem to be crawling with life … Abundance is signified in both the imagery and materiality of the paint itself. It is all too much. Yet for all their abundance, these are scenes in which the middle-class domestic realm – and by extension society at large – teeters on the edge of decay.”¹

Jennifer Law (2014) ‘Historical Delicacies’, in Penny Siopis: Time and Again, Johannesburg: Wits University Press, pages 70 and 71.

Sean O’Toole

Exhibited

KZNSA Gallery, Durban, Red: The Iconography of Colour in the Work of Penny Siopis, 23 June to 19 July 2009.