Marlene Dumas

Marlene Dumas makes paintings with no concept of the taboo. Racism, sexuality, religion, motherhood and childhood are all presented with chilling honesty. Undermining universally held belief systems, Dumas corrupts the very way images are negotiated. Stripped of the niceties of moral consolation, Marlene Dumas’s work provokes unmitigated horror. She offers no comfort to the viewer, only an unnerving complicity and confusion between victims and oppressors.

Often described as an ‘intellectual expressionist’, Marlene Dumas blurs the boundaries between painting and drawing. Bold lines and shapes mix seamlessly with ephemeral washes and thick gestural brushwork. By simplifying and distorting her subjects, Marlene Dumas creates intimacy through alienation. Her subjects’ assertive stares suggest that her paintings aren’t actually about them, but the viewer’s own reaction to their perverse circumstance. With deceptive casualness, Marlene Dumas exposes the monstrous capacity belied by ‘civilised’ human nature.

Beneath Marlene Dumas’s hard-hitting social dialogue is a deep-rooted ideological equality. As one of the most profoundly feminist contemporary artists, Marlene Dumas uses painting as a means to personally navigate history. Her holistic approach to creation and subject undermines the discomfort and restriction of traditional rationale.
from saatchi

http://www.artists-net.de/marlene-dumas/

Never working from a live model, Dumas always begins with photographs that she gathers from fashion magazines and film archives or photos that she takes herself. Dumas revels in thieving images and quotes from wherever and whomever she wishes-her visual and linguistic vocabularies cobble slightly skewed aphorisms to popular and art historical imagery ranging from Mae West to Josephine Baker to Naomi Campbell to Manet's Olympia. What makes Dumas's secondhand depictions so compelling is the way she twists images we've come to take for granted so they are structurally undone, made formally strange, as in Josephine (1997), where the timeless star is simply not herself at first glance. Once we are clued in to the figure's identity through Dumas's title, the cryptic details of the drawing take on iconic pertinence: though for a moment unrecognizable, this is our Josephine, clutching her veil, barely hiding her nudity, her face lit to the point of racial ambiguity. As one would expect, Dumas's background as a white South African-born artist is hardly insignificant in any conversation about her work. Drawings like Selfportrait as a Black Girl (1989) and An African Mickey Mouse (1991) directly address the charged political climate in which she grew up. Yet, Dumas makes a point of making her stance on racial politics more about destabilization than didactic persuasion.

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