Penny Siopis (b. 1953) is a major South African artist whose work in painting, installation, photography and moving image has continually tested and expanded the possibilities of visual practice in South Africa over more than four decades. Born in Vryburg, North West province, and educated at Rhodes University, she came to early prominence in the 1980s with a series of lush, unsettling ‘cake’ paintings in which domestic abundance and colonial excess are presented as symptoms of the same social formation. These early works established the critical and formal intelligence that would characterise her subsequent practice.
Over the following decades, Siopis moved through several distinct but related bodies of work. Her history paintings of the 1990s reworked archival imagery and allegorical conventions to address the violence and shame embedded in South African history. Later, she explored the agency of materials themselves: paintings made by pouring, dripping and allowing pigment, glue and found debris to interact and settle according to their own logic.
Her moving image work, including pieces using found footage, animated sequences and archival film, has addressed migration, vulnerability, the aftermath of conflict and the question of what it means to witness. Across these different modes, her practice is marked by a willingness to take formal risk through form and to allow ethical and historical inquiry to shape formal outcomes.
Siopis has exhibited extensively in South Africa and internationally, including at major biennales and museum venues. She is a professor at the Wits School of Arts and has been a significant influence on younger generations of South African artists as both an artist and a teacher.
Her work is held in major collections and she is widely regarded as one of the central figures in contemporary South African art.
