Marlene Dumas

Marlene Dumas (born August 3, 1953) is a South African born artist and painter who lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Stressing both the physical reality of the human body and its psychological value, Dumas tends to paint her subjects at the extreme fringes of life’s cycle, from birth to death, with a continual emphasis on classical modes of representation in Western art, such as the nude or the funerary portrait. By working within and also transgressing these traditional historical antecedents, Dumas uses the human figure as a means to critique contemporary ideas of racial, sexual, and social identity.

Life

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1953, Marlene Dumas was raised on her family’s vineyard just beyond the city limits in the semi-rural Kuils River region. As a student of painting at the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Arts during the early 1970s, Dumas gained exposure to the decade’s preoccupation with conceptualism and art theory. It was photography, however – the work of Diane Arbus, in particular – that would have the greatest impact on the young artist during this period, introducing her to the “burden of the image” and the complexities of representing the human form. Accepting a scholarship to study at the Dutch artist-run institute de Ateliers, Dumas moved in 1976 to Amsterdam, where she continues to live and work. During these formative years, Dumas explored the relation between image and text in collages, combining clipped photographs, text, and gestural drawing movements.

Work

Working almost exclusively from photographic sources, Dumas draws her subject material from an ever-developing archive of personal snapshots, Polaroid photographs, and thousands of images torn from magazines and newspapers. A painting is never a literal rendition of a photographic source. For one painting, she may crop an original image, focusing on the figures in the far background of a photograph. For another she may adjust the color, using her characteristic palette of grays, blues, and reds. Dumas’s portraits remove subjects from their original context and strip them of any identifiable information. This source material allows the artist to capture her human subjects in their own moment in history, yet provides enough distance for the subject to be quietly and respectfully observed: the awkward babies (The First People I-IV), a captured man (The Blindfolded Man), a posing pregnant woman (Pregnant Image), the face of a notable writer (Death of the Author), or the artist herself (Self Portrait at Noon). The personal and the historical collide in Dumas’s portraits. In Dead Marilyn (2008), a female corpse fills the expanse of a small canvas. This work marked the beginning of a group of paintings of mourning and weeping women, made in the year after the artist’s mother died. Dumas’s treatment of this infamous image of Marilyn Monroe reveals layers of meaning beyond its original source, which was an autopsy photograph. Smeared brushstrokes of white, blue-green, and gray highlight the subject’s blotchy face. The small size of the work and the delicate rendering makes it a portrait of intimacy. Notions of celebrity, sensationalism, and the mystery of the actress’s own personal narrative come into question. In The Pilgrim (2006), Dumas shifts her critical interests in the public notoriety to an image of Osama bin Laden, whose relatively peaceful eyes and mild smile greatly contrast with the media’s typical portrayals. Seemingly cropped from its original photo, we have little sense of context, let alone what lies beyond the borders of the canvas. Stripping her subject of his public persona and historical importance, Dumas leaves us with a critique of both politics and identity. She has said that her works are better appreciated as originals, to mirror the at times shocking, discomforting intimacy she captures with her works.^[1]

The artist is also an avid educator, finding that:

teaching [is] a very important thing, and not only because I teach [the students] things, but also because we have a dialogue, and you see what you really want. You find things out. I still believe in the Socratic dialogue. Art is really something that you learn from being around people.^[1]

Her first major American museum exhibition, a midcareer retrospective entitled "Measuring Your Own Grave", opened in June 2008 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and moved to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The artist is represented by David Zwirner, New York.

Collections

Work by the artist is held in the public collections of various museums, including the ARKEN Museum for Moderne Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois; Bawag Foundation, Vienna, Austria; Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, The Netherlands; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Centraal Museum, Utrecht, The Netherlands; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Centro de Artes Visuales Helga de Alvear, Caceres, Spain; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas; De Ateliers, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; The Flemish Ministry of Culture, Brussels, Belgium; Fonds Regional d’Art Contemporain Picardie, Amiens, France; Gemeentemuseum, Arnhem, The Netherlands; Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague, The Netherlands; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Massachusetts; Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa; Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa; Joods Historisch Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Kasteel Wijlre / Hedge House, Wijlre, The Netherlands; Krannert Art Museum and Kinhead Pavilion, Champaign, Illinois; Kunsthalle zu Kiel der Christian-Albrecths-Universität, Kiel, Denmark; Lieve Van Gorp Foundation for Women Artists, Antwerp, Belgium; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California; Museum De Pont, Tilburg, The Netherlands; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany; Museum het Domein, Sittard, The Netherlands; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerp, Belgium; Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Arnhem, The Netherlands; Modern and Contemporary Museum of Art, Strasbourg, France; Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, North Carolina; Paleis Vught, Vught, The Netherlands; The Saatchi Gallery, London, England; Scheringa Museum voor Realisme, Spanbroek, The Netherlands; Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst, Munich, Germany; Stadsgalerij Heerlen, Heerlen, The Netherlands; Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Stedelijk Museum, Gouda, The Netherlands; Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden, The Netherlands; Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, Schiedam, The Netherlands; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, Belgium; Tate Modern, London, England; and ZKM Zentrum für kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany

Bibliography

• Cornelia Butler, Marlene Dumas: painter as witness, Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2008.

List of References

1. ^ ^{a b} Robert Ayers (November 29, 2006), Marlene Dumas, ARTINFO, http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/24110/marlene-dumas/, retrieved 2008-04-23 

External links

• website Marlene Dumas
• Marlene Dumas at David Zwirner
• Selected Press at David Zwirner
• "Figuring Marlene Dumas," profile by Deborah Solomon in The New York Times Magazine,July 15, 2008 [1]
• The documentary film 'Miss Interpreted' follows Dumas' activities for a period of six months while she prepares for an exhibition. Available on DocsOnline
• Marlene Dumas: Images and Words images, words, works.
• Dutch Master [2] Interview with the artist in W magazine
• Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave Brief description of the artist's exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles
• Zeno X Gallery - Marlene Dumas images, biography and cv.
• The Saatchi Gallery - Marlene Dumas

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Name	Dumas, Marlene
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Date of birth	August 3, 1953
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