Described by Deborah Solomon in a New York Times profile as “one of contemporary art’s most compelling painters,” Marlene Dumas has continuously explored the complex range of human emotions, often probing questions of gender, race, sexuality, and economic inequality through her dramatic and at times haunting figural compositions. Originally published in 2010 on the occasion of Against the Wall, Dumas’s first solo presentation at David Zwirner in New York, this much sought-after exhibition catalogue—which sold out shortly after publication—has been reprinted to coincide with the artist’s 2014–2015 European retrospective exhibition The Image as Burden, organized by Tate Modern, London in collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and the Fondation Beyeler, Basel. Throughout her career, the internationally renowned artist has continually created lyrically charged compositions that eulogize the frailties of the human body, probing issues of love and melancholy. At times her subjects are more topical, merging socio-political themes with personal experience and art-historical antecedents to reflect unique perspectives on the most salient and controversial issues facing contemporary society. The large-scale works included in Against the Wall are primarily based on media imagery and newspaper clippings documenting the conflict between Israel and Palestine, exploring the tension between the photographic documentation of reality and the constructed, imaginary space of painting. The Wall, the painting that began the series, at first appears to present a scene at the Western Wall (also known as the Wailing Wall), an important site of religious pilgrimage located in Jerusalem. However, this work is based upon a photograph from a newspaper that portrayed a group of Orthodox Jews on their way to pray at Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem. Through her delicate treatment of every scene, Dumas destabilizes preconceived notions about what, in fact, is being pictured—engaging the often ambiguous nature of ideas like truth or justice. “In a sense they are my first landscape paintings,” Dumas further notes in the catalogue, “or should I say ‘territory paintings.’ That is why they are so big.” The somber color plates reproduced in the publication are given context by Dumas’s own musings, a text framed as a letter to David Zwirner in which she tries to tell him “about the ‘why’ ” of this powerful series.
The latest from the renowned painter—Marlene Dumas’s new works respond more than ever to the uncertainty and sensuality of the painting process itself. Allowing the structure of the canvases and the materiality of the paint greater freedom to inform the development of her compositions, the artist has likened the creation of these works to the act of falling in love: an unpredictable and open-ended process that is as filled with awkwardness and anxiety as it is with bliss and discovery. Myths & Mortals documents a selection of new paintings—debuted in the spring of 2018 at David Zwirner, New York—ranging from monumental nude figures to intimately scaled canvases that present details of bodily parts and facial features. Several nearly ten-foot-tall paintings focus on individual figures, including a number of male and female nudes and a seemingly solemn bride, whose expression is obscured behind a floor-length veil. Like the Greek gods and goddesses, the figures in these paintings are at once larger than life and overwhelmingly human. The smaller-scale paintings—referred to by the artist as “erotic landscapes”—present a variety of fragmentary images: eyes, lips, nipples, or lovers locked in a kiss. Evident across all of these works is the artist’s uniquely sensitive treatment of the human form and her constantly evolving experimentation with color and texture. Alongside these new paintings, Dumas presents an expansive series of thirty-two works on paper originally created for a Dutch translation of William Shakespeare’s narrative poem Venus & Adonis (1593) by Hafid Bouazza (2016). Myths & Mortals is accompanied by new scholarship on the artist by Claire Messud and a text by Dumas herself.
In her expressionistic drawings and paintings of the last three decades, acclaimed South African artist Marlene Dumas has focused on the human figure, probing themes of love, despair, desire and confusion in order to critique social and political attitudes towards women, children, people of colour and others who have been historically victimized. This substantial, fully illustrated volume, published on the occasion of Dumas's first major American survey, features a newly commissioned essay by renowned scholar Richard Schiff, placing the artist's work in relation to both American figurative painting since the 1980s and Abstract Expressionism. The book also includes curator Cornelia H. Butler's examination of Dumas's photographic sources and shorter texts by Lisa Gabrielle Mark and Matthew Monahan. Writings by the artist, as well as an extensive illustrated exhibition history and bibliography, complete this comprehensive examination of the work of one of the most thought-provoking artists working today.
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