Notes

The artist was the 1984 winner of Absa l’Atelier Art Competition, stayed at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris.

This lot forms part of a loose constellation of analytical selfportraits featuring likenesses of Penny Siopis made during private performances between 1987 and 1994. Typically done collaboratively, these performances have manifested as photos and videos, as well as served as the basis for paintings and drawings. Interested in historical depictions of the Cape Peninsula, especially in colonial maps, Siopis asked her late partner, Colin Richards, an accomplished draughtsman, to draw various maps of the Cape of Good Hope on her back, as well as document the outcome. The resultant photographs formed the basis of two pastel drawings, one depicting the apparently tattooed subject seated upright (Exempli Gratia, 1989), the other depicting her as a prone figure in a landscape based on a second colonial map and framed within an ornate frontispiece taken from a third map of the Cape. ‘Combining different modes of representation in this way I hoped to put something of a strain on the logic of perspective and system of cartography that we usually associate with colonial conquest and the Enlightenment. The work reflects my interest at the time in history written on the body, specifically the female body, and what this says about the colonial conquest and the Enlightenment. In addition, my layering of the pastel was strongly process-based. I’d draw and then sand off part of the drawn surface, then draw again, fix the drawing, sand it, draw and then fix. So the pastel is never a direct depiction but the accumulation of bits of pigment that survive the abraded surface, the drawn surface itself an analogy for the skin of the body.’¹ The draped nude, a staple of art history and photobased erotica, further extends the scope of this enquiry.

1. Penny Siopis (2015) Perspectives 3, Cape Town: Stevenson, page 26.

Exhibited

Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, History Paintings, 1990.

Stevenson, Perspectives 3, Cape Town, 2015.

Literature

Gerrit Olivier (ed) (2014) Penny Siopis: Time and Again, Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Illustrated in colour on page 85.

Stevenson (2015) Perspectives 3, Cape Town: Stevenson. Illustrated in colour on page 25.