Marlene Dumas

(South African, born 1953)

Marlene Dumas is a contemporary South African painter, whose figurative works have earned her a place among the most influential painters of the 20th and 21st centuries. With an oeuvre of haunting portraiture that depicts the artist’s friends, models, and prominent political figures, Dumas consistently explores themes of sexuality, political oppression, identity, and feminism. Her work is informed by her childhood experience growing up in Apartheid, and addresses social struggles of oppressed peoples around the world. Working with gestural brush strokes and thin washes of paint, her works have a distinctly transparent appearance that emphasizes their materiality and intimate subject matter. As an artist deeply concerned with the medium of painting, she once remarked that ”no painting can exist without the tension of what it figures and what it concretely consists of—the pleasure of what it could mean and the pain of what it's not.” Notable figures Dumas has depicted in her work include Alan Turing, Michelle Obama, Naomi Campbell, Amy Winehouse, and Princess Diana. Born on August 3, 1953 in Cape Town, South Africa, she has been the subject of several major solo exhibitions, notably including representing the Netherlands in the 1995 Venice Biennale and a 2015 retrospective at the The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.