Marlene Dumas (SOUTH AFRICAN, B. 1953)

Marlene Dumas recalls in her work the painterly gestures of Expressionism, whilst combining the critical distance of conceptual art with the pleasures of eroticism. Through her delicately painted oil on canvas or ink and watercolor works on the female form as well as portraits of children and erotic scenes, she comments on the state of painting today. The relationships between art and female beauty- or between art historical models and twentieth-century supermodels are constant themes in her work. Dumas does not paint from life but deliberately chooses 'stock' images from a variety of sources, from magazine cuttings to picture postcards to Old Master paintings, as re- observed through her contemporary perspective. Her work is represented in the collections of Centre Pompidou (Paris), MOMA (New York), MuHKA, Museum of Contemporary Art (Antwerp), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), and Tate Modern (London). For 2007-2009 large overviews of her work are scheduled in international museum across Japan, the US and her motherland South Africa. She has had major solo-exhibitions, amongst which Time and Again, the Art Institute of Chicago, 2003, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (1998) and the Tate Gallery, London (1996). In 1995 she represented The Netherlands at the 46th Venice Biennial. Her work was part of numerous group shows in de Appel amongst which Inscapes, (1991), and in De wereld deugt, wijzelf helaas wat minder (2005).