THIS WEEK’S MUSE
MARLENE DUMAS, ARTIST
“Painting is about exploring one’s fears, but also I feel that it can be beautiful somehow.”
Marlene Dumas is a South African artist living and working in the Netherlands. She is widely regarded as one of the most influential and important painters working today.
Born in 1953, Dumas grew up in Kuils River – a few miles east of Cape Town. The area was at the heart of the fast-developing wine industry, and she lived with her father on his vineyard.
She started painting in 1973 and early on her work began to reflect the political and social arena into which she was born. Her concerns grew about the divisive regime of South African apartheid—racial oppression and segregation under the all-white government—that had been slowly taking hold of her country since the late 1940s. Provoked by this cultural oppression, she relocated to the Netherlands in the mid-1970s and has maintained her professional base there ever since.
Dumas has developed a distinctive style that combines artistic philosophy and practice – connecting the subject and narrative of a work to its physical manifestation through the application and manipulation of paint. “Painting has to show its method,” she said. “How it becomes what it is; [it should] move back and forth from the ‘illusion’ to the ‘gesture.’”
Her palette is muted and economic, using a “wet-on-wet technique” that combines and conglomerates layers of ink or paint onto paper or canvas. As inspiration, she uses an array of reference material. Personal belongings, polaroid photographs, newspapers and magazines, and pornographic material all find their way into her work.
Dumas’s paintings are often categorized as portraits, but they do not represent people as portraits typically do. Instead, they aim to represent an emotional state that one could be in. Themes central to Dumas’s work include race, persecution, sexuality, guilt and innocence, violence and tenderness. To create focus and provoke attention, she will often separate the subject from its surroundings with an abstract background of an unspecified space, or sometimes none at all. By removing the subject from worldly references, our attention shifts onto the subject and into that intended emotional state of mind. To that end, she is not interested in creating realistic likenesses but in exploring what she calls “the psychology of people.”
Figures are often rendered larger than life; full body portraits sometimes with a height of three meters and unnatural perspectives to create a surreal or unexpected depiction of the subject. At times her work takes on a ghostly feel as if behind a veil, making them appear almost transparent or on the verge of disappearing.
This powerful approach of uniting technique with narrative gives Dumas’s work a depth that secures our gaze and insists we continue to look and explore.
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HAPPENINGS
Tuesday, August 15, 6–8pm
WOODSTOCK NIGHT DINNER
with Chef Joe Cizynski
We’re “going down to Yasgur’s Farm” – for some delicous gourmet food!
Member: $65, Non-member: $75
DETAILS & TICKETS
Thursday, August 17, 4:30–5:30pm
BEACH BUCKET TAKEOUT
with Chef Joe Cizynski
Pick up your dinner and head right to the beach!
Member: $40, Non-member: $45