The artist lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Marlene Dumas Bibliography. a selection Marlene Dumas: Tronies. In this monograph, she contextualizes her figurative work by placing it in a visual dialogue with paintings by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Flemish and Dutch masters including Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Anthony van Dyck, Frans Hals, Rembrandt van Rijn, Peter Paul Rubens and Johannes Vermeer. This book concentrates on Dumas’ “tronies”—that supremely Dutch genre of painting faces and heads to serve as model expositions of facial expressions and character types. These works on paper, which include the Black Drawings (1991-92) and Models (1994), explore facial structure and emotional expression in ways that resonate with and make overtures towards these earlier paintings and the continuum of art history. Marlene Dumas. Dumas is a highly-skilled ‘painter’s painter’; her work comments on the state of painting today while asking what it means to be a woman working within the predominantly male genre of Expressionist art. Dumas’s work is collected and exhibited internationally, and since the publication of the first edition of this book, her following has continued to grow. Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave. Marlene Dumas has focused on the human figure, probing themes of love, desire, despair and confusion in order to slyly critique social and political attitudes toward women, children, people of color and others who have historically been victimized. From her evocative portraits, based on photographs of friends and family as well as figures culled from printed pornography, to her large-scale images highlighting charged relationships within groups, Dumas’ work explores the contradictions behind the physical reality of the body, merging acute social commentary with personal experience and art-historical antecedent to create unsettling and ambiguous psychological statements. Marlene Dumas Intimate Relations. Dumas’ first solo show in South Africa after moving to The Netherlands 30 years ago provided occasion for this catalogue. Featured are more than 50 paintings, drawings and prints presented at the exhibition, as well as personal letters, documents and photographs collected by the artist. A selection of the artist’s own writings is included, ranging from her unique commentaries on art to aphoristic writings and poetry that are once insightful, witty and thought-provoking.
Marlene Dumas has a remarkable affinity for language. From the very beginning it has played an important part in her work as a visual artist and, moreover, is frequently used as an autonomous vehicle of expression.
In Young Boys, Marlene Dumas’s line-up of ghostly lads is stark and oppressed against the ominous background, trailing off in the distance into mere sketchy traces of suggestion. It’s this suggestion that Dumas does best: a void of colour, a bleeding line, she creates a subtle, unnerving, perversity from an unabashed simplicity. This is painting with no frills: full on, with nowhere to hide…
South African born artist Marlene Dumas has been called “one of the hottest names in contemporary art.” Working in a style that has been called “neo-expressionist” and “conceptualist,” Dumas creates lush, often disturbing and unnerving images of racial, sexual, and cultural subjectivity…
“I write about art because I want to speak for myself. I might not be the only authority, nor the best authority, but I want to participate in the writing of my own history. Why should artists be validated by outside authorities? I don’t like being paternalised and colonised by every Tom, Dick and Harry that comes along (male or female).”
Let’s be clear; it’s not about the color of the skin. Even if I have to admit I have never seen in the history of painting such a wide palette of colors for the surface of the naked human body as I have seen in the paintings of Marlene Dumas. Titian, Rubens, Delacroix, they all showed that the color of the skin in painting can take a full range of blues, reds and greens. But such wonderful, washed out, transparent colors of dark red-brown, deep purpleblue and variations of charcoal on a living body, and such frightful tones of whitish green and bluish mist on a dead body or face, make Marlene Dumas an exceptional painter.
Speaking at the opening of her first exhibition of new works in New York in almost a decade and her first solo show here since a 2008 retrospective at MoMA, Marlene Dumas stood in front of an ebullient self-portrait, the only recognizable trace of her former self in the series of new paintings. “I always zoom in on the human body and the human face,” she explained, referring to her previous work, “but here I wanted to tackle space.
