Marlene Dumas- Drawing

Marlene Dumas creates a wide variety of work including paintings, collages, drawings, prints and installations.

Marlene Dumas (1953 Aged 60) 

‘I don’t have any conception of how big an average head is, I’ve never been interested in anatomy. In that respect I relate like children do. What is experienced as most important is seen as the biggest, irrespective of actual or factual size. In the movies everything is larger than life and yet you experience that as real(istic); all my faces are much bigger than human scale. From blowing up to zooming in, for me the “close-up” was a way of getting rid of irrelevant background information and by making the facial elements so big, it increased the sense of abstraction concerning the picture frame. The elimination of the background also did away with the place of being and environmental context.’ 

A quote from Marlene Dumas.

Key information from the quote includes; elimination of certain things that Dumas does not see is relevant to conveying the person.

Jule-die Vrou , 1985, 125 x 105cm

Die Baba 1985 ,Oil on Canvas on Linen ,130 x 110cm

Dumas' marks are visibly very expressive. Relating this to my work I could use similar colours and brush marks in my city scenes.

Dumas became well known for her portrait and figurative work . " Exploring a range of human emotion while reflecting on social and political attitudes. "

"Her emotional involvement with the subjects coupled with her distortion of the original photographs created unnaturalistic renderings that had characteristically a haunting edge."

"I am dealing with emotions that everyone feels. But I’m always conscious of this tension between knowing that you are making an object, a physical thing, and being aware that you are also referring to things [the emotions] that cannot actually be painted. If the painting works, that tension is in there."

—Marlene Dumas

Marlene Dumas (b. 1953, Cape Town; lives and works in Amsterdam)

The Woman of Algiers, 2001

Oil on canvas

78 3/4 x 39 1/2 in.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, partial and promised gift of Blake Byrne

An explanation of the artwork above- this explains what it is about and who influenced it;

"The Woman of Algiers’s composition is based on a photograph that appeared in the French newspaper L’Express; a naked woman is restrained by men on either side of her, her breasts and pubic area obscured by censor bars that evoke the socio-representational conventions of Dumas’s source material while also suggesting the rectangular forms of Mark Rothko. The title references work by artists including Pablo Picasso in which the subject is depicted as the exotic Other. In this way, Dumas questions the relationship of social history to the history of art."