Early Life and Education
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1953, Marlene Dumas was raised on her family’s vineyard just beyond the city limits in the semi-rural Kuils River region. Her native language was Afrikaans. As a student of painting at the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art during the early 1970s, Dumas gained exposure to the decade’s preoccupation with conceptualism and art theory. Television was not introduced there until 1976, and most of the art she saw was in reproduction. It was photography, however – the work of Diane Arbus, in particular – that would have the greatest impact on the young artist during this period, introducing her to the "burden of the image" and the complexities of representing the human form. Accepting a scholarship to study at the Dutch artist-run institute de Ateliers, Dumas moved in 1976 to Amsterdam, where she continues to live and work. During these formative years, Dumas explored the relation between image and text in collages, combining clipped photographs, text, and gestural drawing movements.
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