Marlene Dumas was born in Cape Town in 1953. She obtained a BA in Visual Arts from Cape Town University (1972-1975; the Michaelis School of Fine Art) before relocating to the Netherlands. There, she completed her studies in Haarlem (at the Ateliers ’63) and subsequently moved to Amsterdam in 1976, where she read psychology (1979-1980).
Fully dedicated to the medium of painting and the art of portraiture, the artist draws inspiration from a plethora of sources, ranging from Flemish paintings to personal Polaroid photographs. The resulting portraits are not focused on imitating real life or photorealism, but emotional expressiveness. Hence the haunting nature of these bodies and faces presented as mere containers for what truly lies beneath. The subjects Dumas explores centre around sexuality, identity, race and oppression. Having grown up under apartheid, the struggles of division and persecution hold a painful place in her personal history. Through art, she gives a material and visual voice to aspects that haunt her. This is not so much straightforward portraiture as it is an exploration of an emotional state.
Methodologically, Dumas employs glazing not only as a technical, but also as a compositional tool. References to art history or literature, figures and words or full sentences complete these ensembles with their variety of possible meanings. With simple yet highly expressive body depictions, she manages to divert erotic and sometimes explicitly pornographic imagery to convey a state or a feeling. Illness, torture, terror and disease can therefore be illustrated and expressed alongside questions about feminine identity in particular and sexuality more generally.
Paris hosted her first solo exhibition in 1979, and things progressed quickly from then on. In 1982, she was invited to show work at the documenta VII in Kassel. She represented the Netherlands at the 1995 Venice Biennale. In 2015, a retrospective solo exhibition was held at the Tate Modern in London.
Dumas lives and works in Amsterdam.
