South African Art Now

MARLENE DUMAS

“I want to paint what you can’t really see. I want painting to compete with music and films, where you have love affairs,” said Marlene Dumas at a walkabout of her exhibition Intimate Relations. Curated by Emma Bedford at the Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg, in 2008, it was the first major exhibition the South African–born painter has held in her home country since leaving it to live in the Netherlands in 1976. Her dazzlingly assured paintings, reflections on the human condition, can indeed inspire the kind of startling insights into one’s own life and beliefs usually afforded by great moments in cinema.

Says painter Penny Siopis, “Dumas is influential in defining the terms of contemporary painting—not just through her subject matter, but in the radical form that she has introduced into painting, and in how she uses paint. She has an intimacy with the surface, rather than a distance.”

Critic and painter Virginia MacKenny has noted in the journal Art South Africa that “In Dumas’s work, it is the painting’s surface that manifests the content. One of the most telling characteristics of Dumas’s work is her negation of one of the singular features of oil painting; she abandons [the paint’s] lustrous qualities for a dusty attenuated substance that can barely hold onto itself.”

Explains Dumas, “Wiping off paint as I work gives me the freedom to change my mind. I’m a bit scared when I start a painting . . . I try to keep it as simple as possible . . . reacting to the surface that I see . . . a painting must be alive . . . there is no use in making a dead painting of a dead person.”

Over the years Dumas’s varied subject matter has included series of portraits of blindfolded men who might be alive or dead; images reflecting the last photographs of people about to be executed; skulls; erotic images of men and women; babies; floating bodies; a portrait resembling Osama bin Laden titled The Pilgrim (2006); Barbie (the doll); as well as portraits of family, like her daughter, Helena; and friends and fellow artists like Moshekwa Langa and Kendell Geers.

Dumas does not draw from life but uses as starting points published photographs, which she collects in boxes with labels like WAR, MALE, FEMALE, SEX, and LOVE. “If it’s a good photograph I don’t want to try to imitate the photograph by making a painterly image of it,” says the artist. “The meaning doesn’t reside in the source but what you do with it.”

Today Dumas is internationally recognized as one of the world’s most important painters. Her mid-career retrospective, Measuring Your Own Grave, opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in mid-2008 and traveled to the Museum of Modern Art in New York at the end of that year.

The First People 1991
Oil on canvas
50 x 60 cm
Collection: De Pont Stichting,
Tilburg, Netherlands
Photographer: Peter Cox
© Marlene Dumas

The Next Generation 1994–95
Mixed media on paper
45 parts, each 66 x 50.5 cm
Presented by the artist to the Iziko
South African National Gallery, Cape Town
Photographer: Pam Warne
© Marlene Dumas