Marlene Dumas - Work

Work

In 1984, Dumas started painting heads and figures. Working almost exclusively from photographic sources, she draws her subject material from an ever-developing archive of personal snapshots, Polaroid photographs, and thousands of images torn from magazines and newspapers. A painting is never a literal rendition of a photographic source. For one painting, she may crop an original image, focusing on the figures in the far background of a photograph. For another she may adjust the color, using her characteristic palette of grays, blues, and reds. Dumas’s portraits remove subjects from their original context and strip them of any identifiable information. This source material allows the artist to capture her human subjects in their own moment in history, yet provides enough distance for the subject to be quietly and respectfully observed: the awkward babies (The First People I-IV), a captured man (The Blindfolded Man, 2007), a posing pregnant woman (Pregnant Image, 1988–90), the face of a notable writer (Death of the Author, 2003), or the artist herself (Self Portrait at Noon, 2008). Executed in the mid-1980s, a series of paintings entitled "The Eyes of the Night Creatures" explores recurring themes in the artist's oeuvre, including racial and ethical intolerance (e.g. The White Disease, 1985). In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Dumas produced a series of works based around the subject of pregnancy and babies. Between 1998 through 2000, in collaboration with the photographer Anton Corbijn, she worked on a project called "Stripping Girls", which took the strip clubs and peep shows of Amsterdam as their subject; while Corbijn exhibited photographs in the show, Dumas took Polaroids which she then used as sources for her pictures.

The personal and the historical collide in Dumas’s portraits. In Dead Marilyn (2008), a female corpse fills the expanse of a small canvas. This work marked the beginning of a group of paintings of mourning and weeping women, made in the year after the artist’s mother died. Dumas’s treatment of this infamous image of Marilyn Monroe reveals layers of meaning beyond its original source, which was an autopsy photograph. Smeared brushstrokes of white, blue-green, and gray highlight the subject’s blotchy face. The small size of the work and the delicate rendering makes it a portrait of intimacy. Notions of celebrity, sensationalism, and the mystery of the actress’s own personal narrative come into question. In The Pilgrim (2006), Dumas shifts her critical interests in the public notoriety to an image of Osama bin Laden, whose relatively peaceful eyes and mild smile greatly contrast with the media’s typical portrayals. Seemingly cropped from its original photo, we have little sense of context, let alone what lies beyond the borders of the canvas. Stripping her subject of his public persona and historical importance, Dumas leaves us with a critique of both politics and identity. She has said that her works are better appreciated as originals, to mirror the at times shocking, discomforting intimacy she captures with her works.

The artist is also an avid educator, finding that:

teaching a very important thing, and not only because I teach things, but also because we have a dialogue, and you see what you really want. You find things out. I still believe in the Socratic dialogue. Art is really something that you learn from being around people.