Marlene Dumas

intimate relations

Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.)

Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, Calif.)

Cornelia H. Butler

Menil Collection (Houston, Tex.)

In her expressionistic drawings and paintings of the last three decades, acclaimed South African artist Marlene Dumas has focused on the human figure, probing themes of love, despair, desire and confusion in order to critique social and political attitudes towards women, children, people of colour and others who have been historically victimized. This substantial, fully illustrated volume, published on the occasion of Dumas's first major American survey, features a newly commissioned essay by renowned scholar Richard Schiff, placing the artist's work in relation to both American figurative painting since the 1980s and Abstract Expressionism. The book also includes curator Cornelia H. Butler's examination of Dumas's photographic sources and shorter texts by Lisa Gabrielle Mark and Matthew Monahan. Writings by the artist, as well as an extensive illustrated exhibition history and bibliography, complete this comprehensive examination of the work of one of the most thought-provoking artists working today.

Measuring Your Own Grave

Marijke Van Warmerdarm

Wave and the Fog of War. Ediz. Inglese

Against the Wall - Marlene Dumas

Edited by Lisa Gabrielle Mark. Text by Cornelia H. Butler, Richard Shiff, Matthew Monahan, Lisa Gabrielle Mark.

Against the Wall

Described by Deborah Solomon in a New York Times profile as “one of contemporary art’s most compelling painters,” Marlene Dumas has continuously explored the complex range of human emotions, often probing questions of gender, race, sexuality, and economic inequality through her dramatic and at times haunting figural compositions. Originally published in 2010 on the occasion of Against the Wall, Dumas’s first solo presentation at David Zwirner in New York, this much sought-after exhibition catalogue—which sold out shortly after publication—has been reprinted to coincide with the artist’s 2014–2015 European retrospective exhibition The Image as Burden, organized by Tate Modern, London in collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and the Fondation Beyeler, Basel. Throughout her career, the internationally renowned artist has continually created lyrically charged compositions that eulogize the frailties of the human body, probing issues of love and melancholy. At times her subjects are more topical, merging socio-political themes with personal experience and art-historical antecedents to reflect unique perspectives on the most salient and controversial issues facing contemporary society. The large-scale works included in Against the Wall are primarily based on media imagery and newspaper clippings documenting the conflict between Israel and Palestine, exploring the tension between the photographic documentation of reality and the constructed, imaginary space of painting. The Wall, the painting that began the series, at first appears to present a scene at the Western Wall (also known as the Wailing Wall), an important site of religious pilgrimage located in Jerusalem. However, this work is based upon a photograph from a newspaper that portrayed a group of Orthodox Jews on their way to pray at Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem. Through her delicate treatment of every scene, Dumas destabilizes preconceived notions about what, in fact, is being pictured—engaging the often ambiguous nature of ideas like truth or justice. “In a sense they are my first landscape paintings,” Dumas further notes in the catalogue, “or should I say ‘territory paintings.’ That is why they are so big.” The somber color plates reproduced in the publication are given context by Dumas’s own musings, a text framed as a letter to David Zwirner in which she tries to tell him “about the ‘why’ ” of this powerful series.

Marlene Dumas: Against the Wall

Frank Demaegd

This catalogue presents an overview of all the works shown at Zeno X Gallery in Antwerp. Since 1993 Marlene Dumas has presented five solo exhibitions in the gallery, respectively titled Give the People What They Want, Time and Again, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Twice and Double Takes. The book includes texts by the artist to accompany her exhibitions as well as newspaper articles and archival photographs.

Marlene Dumas and Zeno X Gallery, 25 years of collaboration

The latest from the renowned painter—Marlene Dumas’s new works respond more than ever to the uncertainty and sensuality of the painting process itself. Allowing the structure of the canvases and the materiality of the paint greater freedom to inform the development of her compositions, the artist has likened the creation of these works to the act of falling in love: an unpredictable and open-ended process that is as filled with awkwardness and anxiety as it is with bliss and discovery. Myths & Mortals documents a selection of new paintings—debuted in the spring of 2018 at David Zwirner, New York—ranging from monumental nude figures to intimately scaled canvases that present details of bodily parts and facial features. Several nearly ten-foot-tall paintings focus on individual figures, including a number of male and female nudes and a seemingly solemn bride, whose expression is obscured behind a floor-length veil. Like the Greek gods and goddesses, the figures in these paintings are at once larger than life and overwhelmingly human. The smaller-scale paintings—referred to by the artist as “erotic landscapes”—present a variety of fragmentary images: eyes, lips, nipples, or lovers locked in a kiss. Evident across all of these works is the artist’s uniquely sensitive treatment of the human form and her constantly evolving experimentation with color and texture. Alongside these new paintings, Dumas presents an expansive series of thirty-two works on paper originally created for a Dutch translation of William Shakespeare’s narrative poem Venus & Adonis (1593) by Hafid Bouazza (2016). Myths & Mortals is accompanied by new scholarship on the artist by Claire Messud and a text by Dumas herself.

Marlene Dumas: Myths & Mortals

Jessica Morgan

Essay by Jessica Morgan. Foreword by Jill Medvedow.

One Hundred Models and Endless Rejects

Tate Modern (Gallery)

Amsterdam (Netherlands). Stedelijk Museum

Issued in connection with an exhibition held at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 6 September 2014-4 January 2015; Tate Modern, London, 5 February-10 May 2015; Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, 30 May-13 September 2015.

The Image as Burden

Emma Bedford

South African National Gallery

Overzicht van het werk van de Zuid-Afrikaanse kunstenares.

Intimate Relations

Mariska Van Den Berg

From the beginning, language has played an important role in the work of Marlene Dumas. Her earliest collages make use of text, and she often writes poetical monikers or captions directly onto her drawings, such as "The Eyes of the Night Creatures" or "Miss Interpreted." Over the last 30 years, the artist has written texts ranging from aphorisms, statements and short poetic pieces to longer analytical essays. Her writing focuses on her own work, discussing its subject matter, its politics, background and source material, as well as its critical reception and her own cultural position as an artist. "I am always 'not from here,'" she writes in one text (a poem), "even though I try to know / or understand 'what's going on' and / what the rules are and how they / keep on changing and what that means. / When looking at images I'm not lost, / but I'm uneasy." Sweet Nothings, originally published in a long out-of-print (and rare) Dutch edition in 1998 and now revised and expanded, provides a selection of her best and most representative writings from 1982-2014. Marlene Dumas (born 1953) is a South African artist who works in a range of media including painting, collage and prints. She moved to Amsterdam for her studies in 1976 and continues to live and work there. She often strips her subjects of their original contexts, working with-while often transgressing and deconstructing-traditional Western modes of representation. She represented the Netherlands in 1995 at the 46th Venice Biennale, and has enjoyed numerous solo museum exhibitions and retrospectives devoted to her work around the world since then.

Marlene Dumas

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