Marlene Dumas is a South African born artist and painter who lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Dumas’s figures have a pale, ghostly quality. Yet they touch upon very earthly concerns: sex, reproduction, motherhood, and advancing age. Many of her most prominent works explore how the lives of women can be defined and reinterpreted through potent images.
Background
Marlene Dumas was born on the 3d of August, 1953 near Cape Town, South Africa, and she grew up in a culture suffocated by apartheid and international isolation. Like many promising South African artists, she moved to Europe – settling permanently in Amsterdam in 1976. Over the following years, the path of history forever changed her South African homeland, and Dumas' own art began to examine the evolution of human lives.
Career
The paintings of Marlene Dumas are based on photographs that she collects from newspapers, magazines, and other sources. They are details – sharply highlighted faces and bodies – that have been stripped of their original context. Dumas uses a restrained color palette and subtle shading to transform her figures in surprising ways. For example, many of her painted infants appear forbidding and almost frightening. The figure in Die Baba (The Baby) (1985) is shown with an angry, defiant countenance. By contrast, Dumas' portraits of older children often reveal more vulnerability. In Helena's Dream (2008), Dumas presents her own daughter's face as somewhat self-conscious – even in sleep. Critics have interpreted such works as reflecting the fears that women experience during both pregnancy and motherhood.
Dumas has also specialized in portraying subjects at the end of life. In her series of painted corpses, she focuses on the dead bodies' heads. These "severed" faces take up nearly the entire canvas, with their ghostly skin and expressionless countenance clearly exposed. Dumas' corpses raise questions about how society deals with mortality and change.
Many of Dumas' best-known works reinterpret the art of celebrity portraiture. These paintings often reject the celebrity’s popular image and explore cultural attitudes that underlie that image. Her 2008 painting of Ingrid Bergman is based on a tearful still from the film For Whom the Bell Tolls. Dumas presents Bergman's wholesome beauty in a distorted way, with skin and lips almost hanging off the face. The work seems to comment on the fleeting nature of beauty – beauty often commodified by the movie industry – and the inevitability of age and death. By contrast, her portrait of Osama Bin-Laden reveals the terrorist leader as a thoughtful, almost docile presence. This work seems to reject the simplistic vilification of even the most controversial public figures.
Dumas also comments on the ways that popular images can define women. Her painted re-creations of erotic photographs, including Adult Entertainment (2000), Feather Stola (2000), and High-Heeled Shoes (2000), probe themes of voyeurism and social entrapment. Another series of works explores the possibilities of the self-portrait, both in paint and in photography. The artist does not idealize her features, and she shows the marks of her age. Some of Dumas' self-portraits even have the same pale countenance as her painted corpses. Such works seem to reject the struggle for eternal youth that contemporary society often demands of women. They also continue a long tradition in the art of Amsterdam; a tradition going back to Rembrandt van Rijn and other Dutch Masters.