Slab

Penny Siopis
Slab, 1982
Oil On canvas mounted to board
Work: 92 x 121.5 cm

Paint in Siopis’ hands is a medium of sensuous and conceptual alterity, of strangeness, of otherness. The touch-oriented, sensuous intimacy of her early work, the logic of assembling readymade materials in complex spatial constellations in the history paintings and assemblages, which follow through in her later installations, can be traced to her maverick use of paint as object, sign, and surface from her earliest creative years. Siopis’ creative affair with materiality and surface is as much an intellectual as an intuitive passion. Tracking that passion through her work offers us profound insights into her distinctive creative responsiveness, riskiness and resilience