Notes

Penny Siopis emerged onto the South African art scene with her now highly sought-after ‘cake’ paintings. Born into a family of confectioners, her earliest work largely comprised depictions of cakes and other baked comestibles traditionally associated with the prescribed domain of women. Influenced by the social environment in South Africa, Siopis was particularly concerned with the way in which women were treated and their position in society viewed throughout history, addressing what she considered the “poetics of vulnerability”.¹

Siopis engages the seductive and emotive qualities of paint and colour. In her early ‘cake’ works, the paint becomes a metaphor for the human body – as the thick paint dries rapidly on the surface creating a hardened film, the inner layers, protected from the elements, dry much more slowly. This is comparable to the reaction to emotional stress when superficial recovery is more rapid than internal healing. The thick paint also invites comparisons with other organic matter like flesh which, over time, loses its malleability, becoming hardened and inflexible. The three-dimensionality of thick impasto paint creates raised areas and shadows on the painting’s surface, adding to the overall tonal variation and theatricality of the work.

As one of the earliest examples of Siopis’s professional oeuvre, Cake: Tapers offers insights into this painterly virtuoso of one of South Africa’s most celebrated contemporary painters. In a review of the artist’s 2009 Paintings exhibition, Marilyn Martin observed how “Siopis’ career reveals extraordinary shifts and changes, but leitmotifs have presented themselves since the beginning: allegory, ritual, sexuality, vulnerability, estrangement and the uncanny”.² The harbingers of all of these characteristics are clearly evident in this early painting.

¹ Kathryn Smith. ‘Penny Siopis’ in Sophie Perryer. (ed.). (2004) 10 Years, 100 Artists: Art in a Democratic South Africa. Cape Town: Bell-Roberts Publishing. Page 346.
² http://art-south-africa.com/archives/archived-reviews/213-main-archive/archived-reviews/1781-penny-siopis-7.html

Literature

Smith, Kathryn (ed.) (2005) Penny Siopis, Johannesburg: The Goodman Gallery Editions. Detail illustrated in colour on page 14.