Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave

March 27– June 21, 2009

Painter Marlene Dumas, born in 1953 in Capetown, South Africa, has lived and worked in Amsterdam since 1976. In her work, she uses the human figure as her subject matter. Both the physical reality of the human body and the psychological aspects of the face and body language are emphasized in Dumas’s works. She traces the cycle of life from birth to death to probe a complex array of human emotions, love, sexual desire, despair, and confusion. She also grapples with the “burden of the image” and the symbolic weight of classical modes of representation in Western art, such as the portrait and the nude; however, by working within and also transgressing these historical antecedents, Dumas effectively uses the human figure to explore and critique contemporary ideas of race, sexuality, and social identity to create images that are formed at the crossroads of personal history and that resonate of the global discourse. (MORE...)

Marlene Dumas, Death of the Author

Marlene Dumas, Death of the Author, 2003. Collection Jolie van Leeuwen © 2008 Marlene Dumas