Penny Siopis

Penny Siopis was born in 1953 in Vryburg, in South Africa's Northern Cape, to parents of Greek descent who had settled in the country after the Second World War. She studied fine art at Rhodes University, earning a BA in 1974 and an MA in 1976, then pursued a postgraduate painting course at Portsmouth Polytechnic in England in 1979. Rhodes University later awarded her an honorary doctorate in 2017.

Siopis came to prominence in the 1980s with large history paintings that used dense, theatrical surfaces, including her early "Cake" paintings, to interrogate colonialism, class, and the visual excess of empire. Her practice broadened over the following decades to include film and video, photography, and installation, with recurring attention to migration, gender, sexual violence, and what she has described as the poetics of vulnerability. She has held academic posts in South Africa for much of her career and is currently an Honorary Professor at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town.

Her work has been the subject of two major retrospectives, "Time and Again" at the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town and the Wits Art Museum in Johannesburg in 2014 to 2015, and "For Dear Life" at the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) in Athens in 2024 to 2025. In 2013 she represented South Africa at the 55th Venice Biennale. She lives and works in Cape Town.

Siopis is consistently framed by museums and galleries as a central figure in South African contemporary art, credited with using history painting and later film and installation to hold apartheid-era violence, colonial history, and gendered vulnerability inside a single, materially dense visual language. Institutional writing around her two major retrospectives, "Time and Again" in 2014 to 2015 and "For Dear Life" in 2024 to 2025, describes a body of work in ongoing dialogue with material culture, migration, and memory. No verbatim critical assessment attributed to a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile; the available record consists of museum and gallery texts rather than signed press criticism.

Siopis's auction market is thin relative to her institutional standing, and her record has been set only recently. Her painting Al Fresco (1990), a large collaged work depicting mining activity, sold at Strauss & Co's Johannesburg evening sale for ZAR 3,431,250 (about USD 209,038), reported by the auction house as a new world auction record for the artist. Strauss & Co's own materials give the sale date as May 2026, though the exact day cited across the house's release and its results page varies between the 26th and the 27th of that month; the figure and the record designation itself are consistent across both accounts. She is represented by the gallery Stevenson, with locations in Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Amsterdam.

Siopis's market is defined less by a long price history than by an unusually strong museum and retrospective record set against a genuinely small pool of public auction sales, so her 2026 record at Strauss & Co should be read as an early, single data point rather than an established trend. There is no published catalogue raisonne, which places extra weight on gallery and studio verification through Stevenson. Because her practice spans painting, film, and installation, valuation across mediums is not straightforward, and collectors should expect any given work's category and material history to matter as much as the artist's name.