Strauss & co - 16 February 2019, Cape Town

50 35 Penny Siopis SOUTH AFRICAN 1953– Gravity’s Wave 2016 ink and glue on canvas 200 by 125 cm R500 000 – 700 000 EXHIBITED Stevenson, Cape Town, Restless Republic , 26 January to 4 March 2017. Welgemeend, Cape Town, Shifting Boundaries: A selection of works showcasing South African women artists of the past 100 years , August 2018. Illustrated in colour on page 43 of the exhibition catalogue. LITERATURE Penny Siopis. (2018) Material Acts , Cape Town: Stevenson. Illustrated in colour on pages 76 and 77. ITEM NOTES Over the past decade, Penny Siopis’s Cape Town studio has been routinely stocked with containers of Alcolin, a local brand of cold glue. Siopis began working with glue as a paint- ing medium in her Shame paintings (2002 – 05), intimately scaled tonal works on paper. The glue’s agency in holding and directing her red inks prompted Siopis to begin using it on canvas. Her first large-scale work on canvas using cold glue and ink was Ambush (2008), a work refer- encing Hokusai’s woodblock print The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife (1814). The present lot appeared on her 2017 exhibition Restless Republic . The dense accumulation of colour and glue at the centre of the canvas is the outcome of a defined studio method: the work was produced without a brush on a horizontal canvas, which Siopis gently tilted. ‘The process is not just about getting a formal effect. The correlations between what I do here physically and my philosophical and political interests in agency, subject/ object and figure/ground distinc- tions, opacity, immanence, viscerality – it all happens experientially in the work.’ 1 Although notionally an abstract painting, Siopis strategically placed three black dots in an area below the central coalescence of green and blue inks. The interven- tion, slight as it is, is suggestive of a figure. Sean O’Toole 1. Penny Siopis. (2018) Material Acts , Cape Town: Stevenson. Page 205.