MARLENE DUMAS (B. 1953) IS AMO...
Marlene Dumas (b. 1953) is among the most important figurative painters working today. Born and educated in South Africa, Dumas emigrated to the Netherlands as a student in 1976. There she studied painting and, later, psychology.Since the 1980s Dumas's work has fused these two academic pursuits by focusing on how the human body is translated into an image with meaning and resonance. Her work, on both formal and conceptual levels, is often disturbing, graphic, and, occasionally, sexually explicit. She is best known for her complex, tightly-cropped paintings of heads, reclining nude figures, and large-scale images of infants and toddlers. Acutely aware of the gender politics of painting the nude figure, the artist rarely uses models; instead, she takes her images from mass media and popular culture sources, particularly newspapers and television.
Ultimately, her paintings (along with her beautifully accomplished works on paper) impress with urgent, oddly manipulated realism. Her purpose as an artist, as she sees it, is to raise provocative questions about gender, beauty, sexual hypocrisy, oppression, sexual and racial violence, and the situation of women and minorities. Dumas, who most often works in titled series, has a remarkable affinity for language and is widely versed in the history of art. From the very beginning of her career, titles, art-historical references, and other forms of written language have played an important part in her work.