Literature

Peter Machen (2010) 'Penny Siopis', The South African Art Times, July, illustrated in colour on page 7.

Notes

The Shame paintings [of which the present lot is a part] are deeply affecting. Often shocking, perhaps especially because of their personal register. The ugliness they are depicting never belies their intense beauty - not only in the use of colour but also because of the evocative, almost abstract shapes, and lack of modulation of form. They suggest to us, in a highly complex way, that at the limits of the ugly, the abject, the repulsive, horror and disgust, beauty might be found; that beauty stands in intimate relationship to ugliness. The work reveals to us the difficulty of beauty as a concept, its shock, which forces in us an active rather than a passive response. Drawing attention to the shameful, to that which makes us ugly to ourselves, Siopis' work at the same time confronts us with the conundrum, the predicament of beauty.

Sarah Nuttall