Marlene Dumas

In the 1980s and 90s, Marlene Dumas (1953) breathed new life into painting with her immediate and emotionally charged visual language and her attention to current and existential themes. Her work centres on the question of how we interpret images. What do you actually see, and what directs your gaze? Her haunting portraits earned Dumas international success and helped enhance the visibility of female artists.

Marlene Dumas grew up in Cape Town and trained at the Michaelis School of Fine Art. In 1976, she moved to Amsterdam, where she still lives and works today. Following early experiments with text, photography and collage, she shifted her focus to drawing and painting in the 1980s. Dumas works quickly and intuitively in oil paint, ink or watercolour, often directly onto the canvas. Her loose brushwork and fluid use of paint create a tension between figuration and abstraction. Faces and bodies remain recognisable, yet are never unambiguous. [Self-portrait at Noon]

The majority of her work is based on a personal archive of diverse images, ranging from Polaroids and family snapshots [The First People] to film stills, journalistic photos, images of historical art and pornographic pictures. Rather than merely copying her sources, she uses them as a reference while exploring how meaning is assigned to images and how she can alter that meaning through her paintings. Her portraits and series of portraits of artists, writers, celebrities, children, dictators, friends, sex workers and healthcare workers [Het Hooghuys (Maar wie ik ben gaat niemand wat aan)] are simultaneously direct, confrontational and empathetic. Dumas invites the viewer to look past the outward image of her subjects and see the inner vulnerabilities and emotions. In this way, her oeuvre explores universal themes such as love, death, mourning, identity, power, sexuality and human frailty.