artist: marlene dumas

Lately I've been loving the work of painter Marlene Dumas

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.

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The relation between art and female beauty, art and pornography, female models and models of art have been a constant theme for Marlene Dumas. Her work recalls the painterly gestures of Expressionism, whilst combining the critical distance of Conceptual art with the pleasures of eroticism. Some of her images are derived from polaroids of friends and lovers, others from glossy magazines and porno pictures. Through her delicately painted oil-on-canvas or ink-and-watercolour works on the female form as well as portraits of children and imagery from contemporary events, she comments on the state of painting today.

Marlene Dumas, Intimate Relations, 2007

  Marlene Dumas, Jule-Die Vrou, 1985

 

Marlene Dumas, Faceless, 1993

Marlene Dumas, Feather Stola, 2000

Marlene Dumas, The Woman of Algiers, 2001

I first became interested in Dumas' work when I was introduced to her series on paintings based off of autopsy photos. Her most famous one is below, referenced from the autopsy photo of Marilyn Monroe:

Marlene Dumas, Dead Marilyn, 2008

Posted by: Molly Davy