ART ESCAPE

Marlene Dumas, 1953

While she lives and works in The Netherlands, the artist was born and raised in South Africa, and her paintings have often drawn from her own experiences of living with apartheid.

From 1972 to 1975 she attended Cape Town University, where she studied for a BA in Visual Arts. She then completed her studies in Haarlem, in the Netherlands.

She has lived and worked in Amsterdam since 1976. From 1978 she has exhibited internationally. Her first major solo exhibition, 1989, opened abroad three months after the birth of her daughter in the Kunsthalle in Berne.

In the past Dumas produced paintings, collages, drawings, prints and installations. She now works mainly with oil on canvas and ink on paper. The sources she uses for her imagery are diverse and include newspaper and magazine cuttings, personal memorabilia, Flemish paintings, and Polaroid photographs. The majority of her works may be categorised as 'portraits', but they are not portraits in the traditional sense. Rather than representing an actual person, they represent an emotion or a state of mind. Themes central to Dumas' work include race and sexuality, guilt and innocence, violence and tenderness.

Marlene Dumas has received several awards and honours.

Although she has had Dutch nationality since 1989, she has said:

Someone once remarked that I could not be a South African artist and a Dutch artist,

that I could not have it both ways.

I don’t want it both ways.

I want it more ways.