Marlene Dumas
(1953 - ) |
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Art Work
| Name: |
Marlene Dumas |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
Cape Town, South Africa |
| Nationality: |
African |
| Birth: |
1953 |
| Death: |
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| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
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| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painting
Photography
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Biography
Looking at her often explicit oil paintings and ink drawings of male and female nudes it seems that her 'messy business' has been chosen to conjure up the tangle of desire, disgust, pleasure and fear that centers on such images.
Photographs of figures in fashion magazines and pornography are the source material for much of Dumas's work. Walking around her exhibition MD: Marlene Dumas, held at the Camden Arts Centre in 2000, there appeared to be a tension between the subject matter and the effect of Dumas's media and technique. In one of the most provocative paintings, Miss Pompadour (1999, private collection), a naked woman bends over, presenting her backside, while looking back at the viewer. Although the pose indicates that the model should be completely exposed, Dumas's bleeding, washy paint actually veils as much as it describes, and draws attention to its own physical presence instead. Languishing between the positions of sexual voyeur, art gallery audience, or perhaps even identifying with the figure, the viewer's stock reactions are stymied. It is a measure of Dumas's subtlety that her art has a pleasurable quality that belies both the complexity of looking at it, and the sometimes 'in your face' postures of her models.
Early in her career Dumas made a series of eight drawings of the female nude. Defining the negative (1988), whose theme was the difficulty of representing the subject for a woman- Dumas made her criticism of the work of some male artists clear in the statements she jotted on them, 'I won't pose for Mr. Salle' and 'I won't eat off Mr. Allen Jones' table'. While sexual display is also a key subject in Dumas's art, she puts different strategies into play. Her series of paintings of the male nude in a state of arousal, the oil JO inch and the ink and acrylic Stream (both shown at her 1999 exhibition MD-Light at London's Frith Street Gallery) redressed the balance, addressing desires other than those of the heterosexual male. Gender politics also informed Dumas's decision to paint, not a portrait of the celebrated founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, but Martha - Sigmund's Wife (1984, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam), the overlooked female figure from history. The artist takes issue with and disrupts the sexual divisions set up in much cultural, social and scientific discourse; as she puts it, during the nineteenth century 'madness took on a female nature: woman = irrationality, silence, nature and body; man = reason, discourse, culture and mind'."
Dumas's paintings of children are also unsettling. The Painter, of 1994, depicts her young daughter, Helena, naked, hollow-eyed, and with hands dipped in paint. The demure look of a little girl is disrupted by her smudged scarlet makeup in Child with lipstick of 1992. Two 1994 oil paintings, Cupid and Reinhardt's Daughter, show an infant bent over on its back, eyes shut, and arms flopping over its head. Although they were developed from photographs of a baby sleeping, the small bodies lying in complete abandon appear to have given themselves up to death. While the first painting depicts a white child, the second is a dark-skinned baby. According to Dominic van den Boogerd in Marlene Dumas (van den Boogerd, Bloom, Cassadio, London 2000), the title Reinhardt's Daughter refers to the American artist, Ad Reinhardt, whose black paintings 'approach the vanishing point of color distinction', Dumas has brought together the art historical and social resonance of color.
Racial politics play a significant role in Dumas's work. She is white, and lives in Amsterdam, but was born in Cape Town, South Africa. In large, grid-like drawings, composed out of groups of small ink sketches of single heads, such as the Black drawings of 1992 (De Pont Foundation, the Netherlands), she exposes the way in which difference is crucial to our sense of identity. Individual faces are often blurry and indistinct, but when the heads are seen together separate identities become clearer, a visual analogy for the way in which we divide humans up into distinct types. Dumas has made images of famous black women, the performers Billie Holliday and Josephine Baker and the supermodel Naomi Campbell (subject of a series of paintings shown at the Venice Biennale in 1995). The artist has also represented her own identity shaped by images of otherness. |
Samples of Work
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