“I want to paint what you
cannot see”
Marlene Dumas
For South African figurative
artist Marlene Dumas the ghosts of
her childhood Linger in her paintings with their restricted palette and portraits
devoid of personality. About which she has written “I use second-hand images
and first-hand emotions.”
Dumas grew up as part of the privileged
class in apartheid South Africa where racism had been institutionalized and
censorship was used to stabilize the regime. It was not until the early 1970’s,
whilst at art school in Cape Town that the first cracks in this façade began to
appear.
Attending a screening of Alain Resnais enigmatic
love story Last Year
in Marienbad left her perplexed, wondering why painting wasn’t as
experimental. As she has said “I was totally perplexed. But I
felt it was important to see how the film broke down the narrative structures,
while there was still somehow a love story in it. So you could have the
politics and the love story and a reflection on the medium.”
At the
age of 23, a scholarship in the Netherlands showed her that painting was addressing
these issues. Dumas also discovered modern and contemporary art, saw for the
first time European classical art in the flesh rather than as reproductions along
with un-censored news photographs
and X-rated magazines. She also started to build her archive of newspaper and
magazine photos which along with her own Polaroid’s are the source material for
her paintings.
Painting from
photographs liberates Dumas from being beholden to the subject; she can alter
the composition to suit the painting’s needs. “People just want to explain everything in relation to
that image,” she lamented to the New York Times’ Claire Messud, “all the better
paintings should be something else.” “It’s
not really a young girl,” she explained, “It’s more an allegory.”
A point Dumas underscores
with her titles which often shock and/or
exhilarate and are imbued with a dark humor. As the curator of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Helen Molesworth
explains “I don’t think people always get the humor, because she’s working out
of that dark Northern tradition of bawdy gallows humor. Every punchline is,
‘And then you die!’ ”
The
retrospective exhibition Marlene Dumas:
The Image as Burden is currently on show at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum until the 4th
of January. In February 2015 it will open at London’s Tate
Modern followed by showing at Basel’s Fondation
Beyeler from the end of May to mid September.
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