About Marlene Dumas
Marlene Dumas (b. 1953, Cape Town) lives and works in Amsterdam, where she has been based since moving to the Netherlands in 1976. She is one of the leading figurative painters of her generation. For almost five decades her work has dealt with sexuality, love, death, shame, political violence, identity and gender. She paints almost entirely from photographs rather than from life, drawing on newspapers, magazines, the internet and her own snapshots of friends, family and public figures. Among her best-known subjects are Naomi Campbell and Amy Winehouse.
Dumas builds her figures from thin, translucent washes of oil and from loose, gestural brushwork. Faces often seem to dissolve into the paper or canvas, and the identity of the sitter stays uncertain. She is less interested in an accurate likeness than in the psychological state of the person portrayed. She has described painting as holding "the pleasure of what it could mean and the pain of what it's not". Drawing and works on paper have always been central to her practice, and her prints, lithographs and editions follow the same approach and themes.
Her work has been shown at three major international exhibitions. In 1995 she took part in the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, alongside Maria Roosen and Marijke van Warmerdam. Measuring Your Own Grave, her first large American survey, was shown in 2008 and 2009 at MOCA in Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Menil Collection in Houston. The retrospective The Image as Burden was presented at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2014 and 2015, then at Tate Modern in London and the Fondation Beyeler in Basel. Her awards include the Rolf Schock Prize in the Visual Arts (2011) and the Johannes Vermeer Award (2012).
