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world’s top selling woman artists – Marlene Dumas.
I had earlier seen her works at the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas, the South African National Gallery, Cape Town, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California, The Stedelijk Museum in the Netherlands, and the Saatchi Gallery in London, England, and was very inspired.
In this article I would like to introduce her work to the Zimbabwean art public in order to encourage and inspire local women artists, young painters and art enthusiasts.
Marlene Dumas is a South African artist and painter who lives in the Netherlands. Born in Cape Town, South Africa, on August 3, 1953, she was raised on her family’s small holding just beyond the city limits in the semi-rural Kuils River region.
As an art student at the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Arts during the early 1970s, she gained exposure to the decade’s preoccupation with conceptualism and art theory.
It was the work of Diane Arbus, a photographer, however, that would have the greatest impact on the young artist during this period, introducing her to the “burden of the image” and the complexities of representing the human form.
Accepting a scholarship to study at the Dutch Artist-run institute De Ateliers, Dumas moved to Amsterdam in 1976, where she still continues to live and work. She works almost exclusively from photographic sources and draws her subject material from an ever-developing archive of personal snap shots.
For her a painting is never a literal rendition of a photographic source. For one painting she may crop an original image focusing on the figures in the far background of the photo. For another she may adjust the colour using her characteristic painting palette of grays, blues and reds.
Dumas’ portraits remove subjects from their original context and strips them of any identifiable information. This source material allows the artist to capture her human subjects in their own moment in history, yet provides enough distance for the subject to be quietly and respectfully observed.
“The Pilgrim” 2006, is one of her enigmatic paintings. Here Dumas shifts her critical interests to the public notoriety of an image of Osama Bin Laden, whose relatively peaceful eyes and mild smile greatly contrasts with the media’s typical portrayals of him.
By stripping her subject of his public persona and historical importance Dumas leaves us with a critique of both politics and identity. She has said that her works are better appreciated as originals to mirror the shocking discomforting intimacy she captures with her works.
The artist is also an avid educator. She says: “Teaching is a very important thing, not only because we have a dialogue in which one discovers new things.
“I still believe in the Socratic dialogue; art is really something you learn from being around people.”
Her work stresses both the physical reality of the human body and its psychological value. Dumas’ paints her subjects at the extreme fringes of life’s cycle – from birth to death. She uses the human figure as a means to critique contemporary ideas of racial, sexual and social identity.
Her works have been exhibited in Germany, France, Denmark, Austria, the Netherlands, South Africa, Tokyo Japan, London England, and the United States of America. Recently, one of her works, entitled “The Teacher”, was valued and sold for US$3,34 million at Southerby’s art auctions, making it one of the most expensive paintings by a living woman artist to date.
She has also been profiled in the New York Times Magazine in 2008, as one of the most successful women artists of the century.
l Dr Tony Monda holds a PhD in Post-Modern Art Theory and Philosophy, and a DBA Doctorate in Business Administration of Post-Colonial Art and Heritage Studies. He is a practising artist, visual designer, corporate image consultant art critic.