Marlene Dumas

Marlene Dumas (b. 1953) is a leading South African painter based in Amsterdam since 1976. Her art examines identity and representation, often portraying the human figure using references from personal archives, art history, and mass media. Dumas’s gestural works probe the boundaries between public and private selves and frequently focus on the female form, exploring themes like expression, self-image, and the role of women in art. She consistently engages with issues of female beauty and the contrast between traditional art models and modern supermodels. Her work resides in museum collections worldwide, including the Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town; Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Beyeler, Basel; Gemeentemuseum, The Hague; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Tate, United Kingdom.

Marlene Dumas (b. 1953) is a South African artist regarded as one of the most influential painters working today. Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Dumas moved to Amsterdam in 1976, where she has lived and worked since. Through painting and drawing she explores the complexities of identity and representation, frequently depicting the human form, drawing her references from a large archive of imagery that she her self has collected, as well as art-historical materials, mass media images and personal snapshots of friend and family. Gestural, fluid, and frequently spectral, Dumas’s works reframe and re-contextualize her subjects, exploring the ambiguous and shifting boundaries between public and private selves. She comments on the state of painting today through her oil-on-canvas or ink and watercolour artworks on the female form: their expressions, their body and facial typologies, their self-image and their ideals. Her works ask what it means to be a woman working within the predominantly male genre of expressionist painting. The relationships between art and female beauty, or between historical art models and twentieth-century supermodels, are constant themes in her work. She has exhibited throughout the world, from The Tate Gallery in London to the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles. For the Soccer World Cup held in South Africa in 2010 David Krut Publishers was and is the sole distributer of the Official FIFA Posters. Dumas was one of the sixteen local and international artists who contributed artworks for these posters. Dumas has been the recipient of notable awards including the Düsseldorf Art Prize (2007); Rolf Schock Prize in the Visual Arts (2011); the Johannes Vermeer Award (2012); and Verleihung des Hans Theo Richter-Preises für Zeichnung und Graphik (The Hans Theo Richter Prize for Drawing and Graphic Art), Sächsische Akademie der Künste, Dresden (2017). Work by the artist is represented in museum collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Beyeler, Basel; Gemeentemuseum, The Hague; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Tate, United Kingdom.