P is for Pink. Penny Siopis at Michael Stevenson
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
P is for painting, and P is for Penny. The two are almost synonymous in South Africa, in which Penny Siopis has remained a Grande Dame of painting over a protracted length of time. P is also for Pink, her favourite colour for some time now, and the central colour of her current show, titled “Lasso”.
You have to hand it to Penny Siopis, she works at her painting. Unlike a lot of artists who have allowed their methods and approaches to painting to stagnate over the years, Siopis subjects her work to constant overhauling and refreshing, giving her current work a relevance unusual in painters who have been around for a while.
Instead of her large Modernist-era works which were thick with impasto daubing, this show also ventures into a more contemporary anti-heroic style of small experiments with water colour and milky glaze in which marks are allowed to spread and coagulate without orchestration by the author's hand. This is a style which strays interestingly into the area of mark-making as a form of fragile and intimate open-ended thought or question, rather than the epic history-painting she has been known for in the past.
Having said all this though, I really battled to find anything of interest on the show. Her best work consisted of the few occasions where her experiments had been allowed to obscure altogether the mark-making of her own hand. Because Siopis's mark-making is trite. Considering the length and status of her career, one would expect more of her. She has not made serious inroads into learning how to draw. One would expect that by now she should be able to approach the skill of someone like Terry Kurgan. But her drawing is fluffy and weak, and does not even interestingly accommodate her own fluffiness and weakness.
It's an outrageous cheek for an unknown nobody like me to fantasise about how I would teach famous and successful people to make better art. But nonetheless I can't help myself sometimes. To Penny I would say, see what you can do with a cloth with dipped in thinners.
Labels: Michael Stevenson, painting, penny siopis
posted by Vince Condesini at 2:51 PM
5 Comments:
whatever fires you up. sounds like joe blog the geezer stuck on the n2 in the daily traffic jam slagging off the schumaker he once glimpsed (on tv)...
This "review" is a joke. It makes me want to vomit.
Whateva floats ur boat :)
This review is the perfect example of absolute idiocy. It is with this idiocy that Conan O'Brien received Hunter S Thompson on the Saturday night live show. In plain English, i would like to say DONT YOU GET IT?! If you defined art and what it is, fine. If you, miss or mister whatever, have decided what art is, then go ahead and make your statement. And i will make mine. You have alot to say about the "refreshment and overhauling" that Penny does. Yes but you have missed the point. Do you not notice the contradiction between pleasure and pain? The screaming message of the work? The reference to the suppression of females for hundreds of years? The fact that we as females often feel scared and alone? The fact that almost every painting seems like a suppurating wound? Do you think that maybe she hates art cunts like you and is simply expressing her mind and feelings? Or do you want to tell her how she can express herself? In what way exactly she is allowed to do so? As if all that she amounts to is your stupid review. I'm sorry, but the sun does not shine out of your "art-hole". Did you notice that i said art-hole? Yes i meant to it was not a spelling mistake that you can critique me on. In the same way, Penny Siopis is not even trying to learn how to draw as you still are you infantile fool. She has surpassed your level of consciousness and is a brave artist, making inraods into feminine expression. Fuck drawing. Thank you very much.
I am sorry but this art is not my type, it id demented of you ask me... but dont get me wrong its your perseption of art not mine, what ever makes you happy, Penny.
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