Penny Siopis

Quick Facts

Full Name	Penny Siopis
Occupation	Visual Artist
Date Of Birth	Feb 5, 1953(1953-02-05)
Age	71
Birthplace	Vryburg
Country	South Africa
Birth City	North West
Horoscope	Aquarius

Penny Siopis Biography

Penny Siopis is one of the most popular and richest Visual Artist who was born on February 5, 1953 in Vryburg, North West, South Africa. Penny Siopis ( 5 February 1953 )is an South African artist from Cape Town. Siopis was raised in Vryburg located in the Northern Cape from Greek parents who moved there following the inheritance of a bakery by Siopis ‘ maternal grandfather. Siopis was a the Fine Arts in Rhodes University in Makhanda, finishing her master’s degree in 1976. Following that, she went on to pursue advanced studies in Portsmouth Polytechnic in the United Kingdom. The Fine Arts department was taught by Technikon Natal in Durban from 1980 until 1983. In 1984, she accepted an academic position in the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. In that time, she also worked as a visiting researcher of the University of Leeds (1992-93) as well as visiting Professor in Fine Arts at Umea University in Sweden (2000) as part of an inter- institutional exchange. Awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Rhodes University, Makhanda – Siopis is currently an Honorary Professor at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town.

In the 90s, Siopis extended her range of media, which included monumental installation, video and film. The principal theme of Siopis her work is typically represented in the form of objects. Siopis has always been fascinated in objects as the carriers of meaning that go beyond their own. Her works have been in various shapes, but Charmed Lives, exhibited in 1999 in New York’s Museum for African Art, was the basis of the idea that inspired the variations that followed. The majority of the objects used that are featured in the exhibits originate taken from Siopis collection. Within Charmed Lives they are arranged into sequences that explore the fragility and instability of memories, both personal and collective. They ask concerns about archives and the truthfulness of the historical record.

The series investigates personal and public narratives around fear and trauma in South Africa, giving form to things that seem impossible to speak about directly. It is an allegory of the nation’s deepest fears around issues of poverty, xenophobia, race, and crime, – at a time of radical social transition and uncertainty post- 1994. These at times playful configurations also serve as sites of felt and imagined traumas in a society where violence committed against women and children is far too common.

Occasionally, some are singled out to become part of the ongoing Will project. The installation Will, started in 1997, functions as an ultimate time piece. Siopis sees it becoming alive only on her death: she has singled out objects from her vast collection and bequeathed them to individuals all around the world. Upon her passing they will be sent out to their recipients. Seen as an autobiographical project, this particular collection also functions as an archive and inventory of both personal and collective history. The work comments on the lives and perceptions of objects that could function both as art and heirloom, representing different values for those who possessed them before the artist and those who will end up owning them in the future. The installation presupposes an end through its own fragmentation. It will continue living as a memory; at the same time the objects, having been dispersed, will acquire new meanings that have the potential to continue to evolve forever.

Between 1985 and 1995, Penny Siopis produced a body of work that is often described as her “history painting”. Though her passion for the physicality of paint as well as her exploration with this medium never stopped in this period, the paintings from this period were distinct in many ways from her ‘cake’ paintings. The shift was evident by Her Still Life with Watermelon and Other Things (1985); it was made more apparent with Melancholia (1986). The painting depicts a vision of the decline of colonialism the scene of Melancholia is also a vanitas painting and a painting of history. It incorporates symbols of European high culture as well as reference to Africa as well as references to Africa. All of them being piled up as the remains of the past in a cramped space that symbolizes the ruins, excess and mental distress. The historical painting genre was regarded as the greatest accomplishment in the European art the historical tradition. Siopis ironic reinterpretation of its structure and concept is apparent in works such including Patience on a Monument: “A History Painting” (1988).

Penny Siopis Net Worth

Penny Siopis is one of the richest Visual Artist from South Africa. According to our analysis, Wikipedia, Forbes & Business Insider, Penny Siopis 's net worth $5 Million. (Last Update: December 11, 2023)

Between the years 1980 and 1984, Siopis made her “cake” paintings, which were inspired by her childhood memories that she witnessed her mom freeze cakes at the bakery of her family. Siopis love of the equipment employed in the bakery led to the first collection of her career. Instead of traditional paintbrush methods, she utilized unconventional tools, such as pipe nozzles, as well as other tools utilized in decorating cakes. The artist was interested in exploring the materials of paint and the potential of it as an artifact, Siopis worked with oil paint in a manner that was different from the norm by layering it in high relief, using the technique known as impasto. This technique causes the outer layers of medium to become dry before the interior layer, which causes the surface to shrink and break over time.

Her fame was heightened in the 1980s, with her “cake”-like paintings that materially represent feminist aesthetics on thick impasto oil painting surfaces. They were then followed by her “history paintings which were interpreted as a form of protest against apartheid. Her interdisciplinarity since the liberation of her nation has focused on the persistence and fragile nature of memory, concepts of truth, as well as the complicated interplay between personal as well as collective stories. In her experiments with a broad range of techniques and materials she considers the political implications of the body, shame and grief as well as estrangement, migration, and most recently, the connection between the human and non-human in the environment the changing climate. In all her work, she asserts materiality and process as being inseparable from the concept as well as her distinctive usage of a variety of chance-driven techniques revealing her interest in the poetry of vulnerability’. Griselda Pollock explains, “Penny Siopis is one of the few artists in the world today who can weave a material web of marks, gestures, voices, words, found things and painted surfaces to entangle the brute forces of history with the delicate threads of human vulnerability.”

Siopis began working with film in 1994 with her film Per Kind Permission: Fieldwork. However, in 1997 Siopis found her niche in film making through the work My Lovely Day. She has continued to work with film throughout her career and describes the videos as montages, cut-and-paste images that move and unfold over time. Combined with text and music, film offers a wonderful opportunity for narrative.

Height, Weight & Body Measurements

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Who is Penny Siopis Dating?

According to our records, Penny Siopis is possibily single & has not been previously engaged. As of December 1, 2023, Penny Siopis’s is not dating anyone.

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All the videos take a very particular story from South African history that has an elemental quality and speaks beyond its historical circumstances; two of them, Obscure White Messenger (2010) and The Master is Drowning (2012), look at the actual and attempted assassinations of apartheid Prime Minister H.F. Verwoerd. Siopis draws on various archival sources to construct the narrative, and use different modes of address, but she prefers the first person. In Obscure White Messenger she uses a question and answer format, which she drew from the psychiatrist’s report of the interview he had with Dimitrio Tsafendas, immediately after the murder. In the beginning of the film it is not easy to work out who is talking: who’s the ‘you’ and who’s the ‘I’?.

Facts & Trivia

Penny Ranked on the list of most popular Visual Artist. Also ranked in the elit list of famous people born in South Africa. Penny Siopis celebrates birthday on February 5 of every year.

In My Lovely Day Siopis cuts sequences from her mom’s 8mm home movies that she took of their family life in the 50s and 60s, and the more public events that were caught in the sweep of her camera. She combined these with music and the remembered words of her grandmother, presented as subtitles. She wove the story of three generations of women, as a kind of transgenerational haunting. The story compresses historical time into one day. The historical moment of her telling is apartheid South Africa, but her references to social turmoil and catastrophe are to earlier times: the ‘exchange of populations’ following the Greco-Turkish conflict of 1919–1922, the massive migrations sparked by the two World Wars and the beginnings of the decolonisation of Africa.

Top Facts about Penny Siopis

1. Penny Siopis is a renowned South African artist.
2. She was born in Cape Town in 1953.
3. Siopis studied Fine Arts at the University of Cape Town.
4. Her work explores themes of memory, identity and history.
5. Siopis has exhibited extensively both locally and internationally.
6. She was awarded the Order of Ikhamanga in 2018 for her contribution to art.
7. Siopis’ work often incorporates found objects and materials.
8. She is known for her use of unconventional techniques such as staining and dripping paint.
9. Siopis’ works are held in major collections around the world, including Tate Modern and MoMA.
10. In 2020, she was included in ArtReview’s Power 100 list of most influential people in contemporary art.

What type of artist is penny siopis?

Siopis works in painting, film/video, photography and installation. In the past, her work critically engaged the genres of still life and history painting.

What materials does Penny siopis use?

She uses the associative and symbolic qualities of both her imagery and her chosen materials, including oils, liquid ink washes and viscous glue , to express her subjects. The process itself becomes important to her explorations.

Where was Penny Siopis born?

Vryburg, South Africa

Who is blessing Ngobeni?

Blessing Ngobeni is a South African visual artist who creates abstracted works with a range of found objects; magazine advertisements; newspaper articles; and paint on canvas.

When did George Pemba begin to create?

His first commission came in 1950, in the form of a portrait of the educator and activist, Professor Davidson Don Tengo Jabavu for the University of Fort Hare. Pemba produced a satirical cartoon for the first edition of the African National Congress’ newspaper Isizwe released in June 1959.