Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden
Tate Modern, London
5 February – 10 May 2015
Rejects, 1994-2014.
About:
Marlene Dumas is one of the most prominent painters working today. Her intense, psychologically charged works explore themes of sexuality, love, death and shame, often referencing art history, popular culture and current affairs.
‘Secondhand images’, she has said, ‘can generate first-hand emotions.’ Dumas never paints directly from life, yet life in all its complexity is right there on the canvas. Her subjects are drawn from both public and personal references and include her daughter and herself, as well as recognisable faces such as Amy Winehouse, Naomi Campbell, Princess Diana, even Osama bin Laden. The results are often intimate and at times controversial, where politics become erotic and portraits become political. She plays with the imagination of her viewers, their preconceptions and fears.
Het kwaad is banaal, 1984.
Born in 1953 in Cape Town, South Africa, Dumas moved to the Netherlands in 1976, where she came to prominence in the mid-1980s. This large-scale survey is the most significant exhibition of her work ever to be held in Europe, charting her career from early works, through seminal paintings to new works on paper.
The image as burden, 1993.
The title of the exhibition is taken from The Image as Burden 1993, a small painting depicting one figure carrying another. As with many of Dumas’s works, her choice of title deeply affects our interpretation of the work. It hints at the sense of responsibility faced by the artist in choosing to create an image that can translate ideas about painting and the position of the artist. For Dumas it is important ‘to give more attention to what the painting does to the image, not only to what the image does to the painting.’
In an age dominated by the digital image and mass media, Dumas cherishes the physicality of the human touch with work that is a testament to the meaning and potency of painting.
A survey of works by the South-African born artist gives reason to why she is perhaps the world’s most interesting figure painter.
(press release Tate Modern)
The Painter, 1994.
Banner image credits: Marlene Dumas Rejects 1994–2014 Private collection © Marlene Dumas
Exhibition organised by Tate Modern in collaboration with Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Nuclear Family, 2013.
