Skulls

Marlene Dumas
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1953.
She lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

South African artist Marlene Dumas’s paintings are infatuations with the human form—whether whole or fragmented, familiar or peculiar—and its varying approximations to eros and death. She draws, drips, smears, and daubs paint, frequently with her own hands and fingers, to elicit a spectrum of human flesh tones. Often rendered in bleeding lines and stains of wash against spare backgrounds, Dumas presents the unabashed nakedness of inhabited, or once inhabited, bodies in all their bruised particularities. Marlene Dumas trained at the University of Cape Town before moving to The Netherlands, where she studied painting and psychology in the late 1970s. She culls her subjects from a private archive of photographs, including her own, that encompasses children, pornographic nudes, corpses, torture victims, and terrorists. This attachment to photographs places Dumas in the company of the German artist Gerhard Richter and the Belgian Luc Tuymans, but also in the wake of the so-called Pictures Generation and photography’s increasing expansion of and invasion into the realm of the visible. As paintings, her renderings disrupt the source material they are based on, restoring corporeality to the photographic image. Eroticism ranges from explicit depictions of sexual acts and genitalia to lyrical tracings of desire. Even when lurid evocations of dead or brutalized bodies populate her works, Dumas aims to reveal rather than display.
During the past decade Dumas has ventured further to pointedly address perceptions of gender, race, and ethnicity. Her paintings confront less the aggregation of images in the public consciousness than the perilous consequences of visual bias and stigmatization that are the inheritances of apartheid and the legacy of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001—two historical moments that impacted Dumas deeply. These works register sexual intensity where it breaches into political aggression and the discomfiting truth that all images, however pleasurable to feast upon, are capable of violence.