Marlene Dumas

Marlene Dumas (born 3 August 1953) in Cape Town, South Africa and grew up in Kuils River in the Western Cape, is a South African artist and painter based in the Netherlands. Dumas witnessed the system of apartheid during her childhood. Dumas began painting in 1973 and showed her political concerns and reflections on her identity as a white woman of Afrikaans descent in South Africa. She studied art at the University of Cape Town from 1972 to 1975, and then at Ateliers '63 in Haarlem, which is now located in Amsterdam. She studied psychology at the University of Amsterdam in 1979 and 1980. She currently lives and works in the Netherlands and is one of the country's most prolific artists.

Quotes

• "I have always been interested in how you can depict suffering without being heavy-handed"
• "My best works are erotic displays of mental confusions (with intrusions of irrelevant information)"
• "I don't go to psychiatrist. I don't go to a gym. I run away from my accountant, I run away from my dentist. They all supposed to help you, but i like to stay in bed where I have a chance to reflect, like Rossellini"
• "Painting is a very slow art. It doesn't travel with the speed of a light. That's why dead painters shine so bright"
• Painting doesn't freeze time. It circulates and recycles time like a wheel that turns. Those who were first might well be last."
  • "Marlene Dumas Biography, Life & Quotes". The Art Story. Retrieved 22 March 2025.
• ” No painting can exist without the tension of what it figures and what it concretely consists of the pleasure of what it could mean and the pain of what it's not.”
  • Kazakina, Katya (8 December 2023). "Zwirner Reports a $9 Million Marlene Dumas Sale. That Has People Talking For Two Reasons". Artnet News. Retrieved 22 March 2025.

Quotes about her

• "Her work is informed by her childhood experience growing up in Apartheid and addresses social struggles of oppressed peoples around the world. Working with gestural brush strokes and thin washes of paint, her works have a distinctly transparent appearance that emphasizes their materiality and intimate subject matter."
  • Kazakina, Katya (8 December 2023). "Zwirner Reports a $9 Million Marlene Dumas Sale. That Has People Talking For Two Reasons". Artnet News. Retrieved 22 March 2025.