Marlene Dumas is an artist whose name has always provoked heated debate and sustained attention in the contemporary art world. Originally from South Africa, she chose Holland as a place to realize her creative ideas, where she has been creating disturbing, provocative and painfully shocking images for over forty years. The artist, who has rejected academicism but not figurativeness, turns the idea of beauty, femininity and innocence upside down. Why viewers are sometimes afraid of her watercolors and how Dumas turns images from the glossy into frightening revelations. Let's talk in our new article.
Evil is Banal. 1984
Marlene Dumas Born August 3, 1953, Cape Town, South Africa. She is one of the most prominent figures on the contemporary art scene, born in South Africa, and has lived and worked in Amsterdam, Netherlands since 1976.
Her mother was a housewife, her father a small vineyard owner. In the city where Marlene grew up, mass culture did not reach, and the content of films that were shown in the local theater, strictly censored. Marlene amused herself by drawing princesses and cartoon heroines. “It was always a face or a figure, I never depicted a tree for example,” the artist is quoted as saying.
She made the decision to leave for Holland because of disagreements in her family and total censorship in the country.
The Luxury of Tenderness. 1986
The main themes of Dumas's work remain portraits, depictions of the nude and the human figure. Classic motifs she infuses with anxiety, tension and sensuality. Dumas loves to provoke the public to emotion with her work and feels very confident in this, literally like a fish in water. In addition, she is perhaps the most famous artist working in watercolor. For over twenty-five years she has been faithful to the wet-on-wet technique on large sheets of paper. Women and girls are her main characters, but she almost never works with sitters.
The kiss. 2003
The sources of inspiration for her are photos or clippings from newspapers and magazines, as well as her own snapshots taken on a snapshot camera. Her personalities do not matter to her: it can be a famous model, an iconic image or an ordinary “man in the crowd”. In her works with difficulty but, you can recognize and Mae West, and Naomi Campbell, and even Olympia from the canvas of Manet. However, Dumas depicts them on his paintings in his own way. He removes all the husks and unnecessary, contrived, rethinking them anew, depriving them of a patina of glossiness and glamor. Marlene Dumas' goal is to rid the viewer of associations and stamps. She tries to show the inner world of a person as she saw it. As if in opposition to hyperrealism, her work emphasizes the imperfections of the model.
In 2008, Dumas set a new world record among contemporary women artists her painting “The Visitor” sold at Sotheby's auction for 6.3 million dollars.
Girl
Dumas's paintings often make a shocking impression, largely due to her vision and interpretation of familiar subjects. Some of them refer to biblical motifs - Salome with the head of John the Baptist, Judas, Mary Magdalene - but are filled with disturbing, almost obscene eroticism. They cause rejection by their frankness, especially it makes a strong impression in combination with a soft, “innocent” watercolor technique.
Even children in her works look not as symbols of purity, but as something terrible, almost frightening. The series “Memories of Pregnancy” shocks the viewer with images of babies filled with malice and repulsive physiology - swollen, with bluish skin, reminiscent of demonic dolls. Among these images is her own child, depicted not in the traditional sympathetic way, but as a creepy creature. This device is one of the manifestations of Dumas's trademark provocativeness.
Broken white. 2006
Dumas's style is easily recognizable: heavy eyelids, swollen mouths, careless strokes, tar-colored hair, and a tense color palette. At the same time, each work combines carelessness and care, spontaneity and meticulous precision. Liquid spots of paint flow into detailed forms, creating a strange, expressive quality. Even in static images one can sense an unsettling mobility, as if the characters were on some kind of edge. She was not afraid to paint a self-portrait entitled “Drunk”, on which she depicted herself as a “naked, old, drunken woman”.
The Image as Burden/ 1993
The themes Dumas chooses are relevant to the art of our time: feminism, gender, sexuality, death, cultural identity. Despite her classic Dutch blonde appearance, she successfully emphasizes her African origins by incorporating elements of the “black continent” into her work: ritual, mysticism, and cultural codes. For example, in one of her works, she depicts herself as black, as if emphasizing the duality of her own identity. This image becomes part of her creative intent and certainly adds new meanings to her works.
In the circle of contemporary artists such as Anish Kapoor or Shirin Neshat, Marlene Dumas feels confident. She is not just a master of form, but also a master of symbols. In her work, modernity meets eternity and provocation meets deep reflection.
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