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STEVENSON Amsterdam is pleased to present In the Air, Penny Siopis’ first exhibition in the Netherlands.
Atlas, the series of 57 paintings central to this exhibition, was created in the artist’s living space, ‘thick with fumes and dreams and the ever-present view of the sea’, over the recent period of isolation. Siopis writes:'This is the first time I have lived with my paintings, or rather in my paintings, as they literally clad the walls around me, and the first time I have painted by the sea. The protean sea, the epitome of change, morphing all the time; this has had a potent painterly effect on me - despite my longstanding affair with flux and fluidity.'
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Atlas II, 2020
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Overflow: Lunar, 2019
'The lifeblood of the paintings is liquid ink and viscous glue which alter when coming into contact with air, water, gravity and my hand, with everything moving in tune with the open receptive tooth of the paper. Later creamy, crusty, sticky oil paint joins the fray, and endless possibilities emerge, each a potential image and site for imagining both within and beyond the bounds of the page.
Each seems like a scene – someone described seeing operas – but you can’t tell what’s going on. There are bodily-looking things, animal-like forms, vegetable shapes. Stains and swathes that have the feeling of water, wind, fire. Bits and pieces fly around, float; some fall or sink into substance, drown. Other surfaces erupt, break out. Presences peer from behind curtains, visors, tear barriers, touch other presences, distill into dots that read as eyes, beat their breasts, have tantrums, seem like grief, appear like love, ecstatic, tragic. But these are nothing but visual incidents. Material twists and turns on the page. Capacious colour stains. Paint skin thick enough to catch the light. Cut into, perforated, at times to draw you in. Glue, once writhing, now dry, suspended animation – gestures of formless matter. In this particular uncertainty, everything is open to being shaped; you can see things in things. The air is thick with the times.'
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Atlas I, 2020
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5 min 12 sec
Edition of 3 + 1AP -
She Breathes Water is constructed with found footage and audio, foregrounding non-hierarchical meaning-making and relationality. Siopis writes: 'She, the protagonist, is an octopus, a creature who started out life with us human creatures, and somehow we lost her the moment we took our terrestrial (and territorial) turn, the path that led to the destruction of the planet … Here she is offering us her ink to help us redeem ourselves and start to write a new history ‘not all about our might.'
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Cloud Cry, 2019
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Penny Siopis: In the Air
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