Painting 1 / Fall 2017: Marlene Dumas

Marlene Dumas

Marlene Dumas is a painter from South Africa based out of Amsterdam, Netherlands. She has been an exhibiting artist since the 1970's and is one of the most influential painters of her time. Her medium changes from project to project where she has utilized ink drawings, watercolors, as well as oil paints. Her paintings stem from her personal interactions with everyday life. Inspiration might come from a personal memory that she has of her daughter or an old polaroid picture found out in the world. She uses these 'secondhand images' to create 'first hand experiences' in her own words. The majority of her work deals with the study of one human figure more often than not in seclusion within the frame itself. The figures are dark and colorful and depicted as a form of their natural self that has been altered. These are not paintings made to look photo-realistic, rather they hold feeling, emotion, political messages, and much more that are meant to stimulate inner dialogue with the subconscious. Her paintings also speak strongly to the human form and forms of expression particularly pertaining to feelings of sadness, frustration, and abuse. Some of the paintings are of popular icons such as Andy Warhol and Barak Obama however most of them focus on random people to which all viewers can relate. The human expression, the human form is an extremely powerful vessel to transmit feeling and emotion into the world and that’s what her paintings achieve.