calendario eventi  :: 

X

2/7/2010

Marlene Dumas

Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto

Curator Ulrich Loock

Marlene Dumas (1953, Cape Town) belongs to the generation of painters who emerged in the 1980s under labels such as 'Wild Painting'. Her insistence on modes of figurative representation may be considered a reflection of that generational proximity. On the other hand, Dumas never integrated into any artists' group – this may partly be attributed to her arriving in Holland only after having started to study art in Cape Town (until 1975) – more importantly, however, she never joined in the contemporary painters' rejection of conceptualism. On the contrary, all through her career her painting and drawing has had a strong focus on conceptual issues such as the position of the author, interpretation, the art world, art history, family, gender, sexuality/erotics, and death, which she has also reflected in powerful and independent writing, sometimes integrated into the painted works, sometimes independent of them.

Neither her painting and drawing nor her writing is ever univocal and none is designed to 'explain' the other. Rather, it is evocative, opening the field to further questioning. Much of Dumas's work is unleashed by her own personal experience, but her figures and depictions usually are filtered by photographic source material – images from the media as well as personal photographs which Dumas gathers in a large archive. Outstanding in all her work is a group of allegorical paintings from 1988 which create an analogy between the gazing at a woman and the attributing of meaning. This reflection on the violent and gendered nature of interpretation is also addressed in the later title of her exhibition, 'Miss Interpreted'. 'They are looking for Meaning as if it were a Thing. As if it were a Girl required to take her panty off, as if she would want to do so as soon as the true interpreter comes along. As if there were something to take off.' The abstainment from interpreting herself is an ongoing concern of Dumas which is translated by her painting isolated figures, if not fragments of the body.

In 1991/1992 her work underwent a major shift initiated by the use of ink washes on paper. Much more than before, the material and the practice of the painterly implementation of pictures was consciously made an integrated part of the work. The partially unpredictable flow of the ink turned into a material analogy of the evocative nature of the depictions. Black Drawings, a large set of ink washes on paper is important because Dumas succeeded for the first time in portraying black people, the oppressed people of her South African childhood and youth – each sheet shows the face of a person – and because she arrived at a fusion of subject matter and actual painting, the images are of black people and are black themselves. That way Dumas created an incomparable closeness to the depicted faces. At the same time she left it up to the spectator to draw conclusions from the pictures – the wall of small scale paintings functions as an archive, a tool for study and reflection, and not as pictorial textbook. Soon after, in 1993, Dumas turned to addressing another field of her concern in an unexpectedly frontal way: the visual drive fuelled by desire and the excitement of looking at someone performing for the gaze of the other animated works such as Porno Blues or Porno as Collage. All through the 1990s Dumas made more or less extended groups of ink washes, from the middle of the 1990s also larger and coloured ones, many of them seductive works depicting women in undisguised erotic or pornographic poses.

Until then, while her work had developed from initially personal and private concerns – even though she had always been concerned with the relation between the private and the public – broader social and political issues became paramount. Dumas returned to oil painting, now under the impression of the crisis in the relation to the other epitomized by the 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers. There are images of people – usually only parts of people's bodies – who are blindfolded, subdued to treatment with duct tape, there are images of hanged girls, faces of the dead and then under the title 'Man Kind', portraits of Arab males. Much of the imagery originated from the wars in Gaza and Iraq.

Marlene Dumas is counted among the foremost painters of our time and her work has been exhibited all over the world, most recently in a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Lately she has started to make work in which she experiments with new and surprising ways to make paintings. The show at Serralves is planned as an exhibition of recent work which will allow the public to track Dumas' questioning and developing of her own achievements – in a way it is considered to mark a new beginning after becoming one of the most outstanding success stories in recent art.

Production: Fundação de Serralves

GUIDED TOURS:
08 JUL (Thu), 18h30 p.m., by Ulrich Loock
15 JUL (Thu), 18h30 p.m., by João Fernandes
20 JUL (Tue), 18h30 p.m., by Ricardo Nicolau

10 JUL (Sat), 17h30 p.m., by Ricardo Nicolau (exclusive for Serralves Friends)

Image: Marlene Dumas

Press Officer
Marta Morais Tel: +351 226156500 Fax: +351 226156533 m.morais@serralves.pt

Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art Oporto
Rua Dom João de Castro, 210 / 4150-417 Porto
Tuesday - friday 10 a.m. - 5 p.m., saturday, sunday and holidays 10 to 7 p.m.
The ticket-office closes 30 minutes before the closing time of the Museum.
Entrance:
Museum and Park – € 5,00
Park – € 2,50
Free Under 18s and on Sundays: 10 a.m. – 2 p.m.

stampa

permanent link