Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave at MoMA The Museum of Modern Art on artrepublic.com
Exhibition running from Dec 14 2008
until Feb 16 2009
This is the first North American mid-career survey of paintings and drawings by Marlene Dumas. The exhibition features approximately 70 paintings and 35 drawings ranging in format from small individual drawings and intimate, early sketchbooks, to large-scale ink washes, which are, in some cases, more monumental than the paintings. Several series of drawings are also featured, including Models, which consists of 100 single sheets. Dumas’s paintings are also diverse in size and scale— ranging from very large, recumbent figures of the dead or newborn, to several paintings just completed by the artist and seen at MoMA for the first time in the United States. The exhibition takes its subtitle, "Measuring Your Own Grave," from a painting made in 2003. In this work, a figure bows toward the viewer, gracefully stretching its arms the width of the canvas. The title suggests that the space of the canvas becomes the figure’s coffin or grave— for the artist, this measuring is akin to the process of representation itself. "Marlene Dumas is one of the most intriguing painters working today," Ms. Butler said. "Her exploration of portraiture and engagement with many of the most difficult social issues of our time is truly unique, as is her continuing commitment to painting as a relevant and powerful medium." Born in 1953 in Cape Town, South Africa, Dumas studied art at the Michaelis School of Fine Arts at the University of Cape Town and moved to Amsterdam in 1976 to pursue further studies at de Ateliers. Dumas has lived and worked in Amsterdam ever since. This exhibition surveys more than 30 years of work and is organized around the theme of portraiture, which Dumas treats as a psychological phenomenon, like a Rorschach test. Drawing almost exclusively on photographic source material, Dumas explores crucial questions of humanity and representation. Subjects of life, birth, sex, death, grief, and identity are represented through portraits and images drawn from her ongoing archive of Polaroid photographs, personal snapshots, and thousands of media images culled over time. A painting is never a literal rendition of a photographic source, nor is the material source of a painting the same as its psychological subject matter. Rather, Dumas focuses on the inherent differences between photography and painting—what she has described as "the essential immorality or indifference" of a photographic image when it is removed from its original context or stripped of its identifying information. The exhibition is installed not chronologically but rather associatively, and reflects Dumas’s ongoing investigation of the same topics, as well as the artist’s tendency to work in series, with drawing series and groups of paintings arranged together to create new associations. OPENING HOURS: Sat - Mon: 10.30 - 17.30, Wed & Thur: 10.30 - 17.30, Fri: 10.30 - 20.00 Image Credits: Marlene Dumas, The Kiss, 2003, Oil on canvas 15 3/4 x 19 11/16 in. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London © 2008 Marlene Dumas Marlene Dumas, Jen, 2005, Oil on canvas, 43 3/8 x 51 1/4 in. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Fractional and promised gift of Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis © 2008 Marlene Dumas, Dead Marilyn, 2008, Oil on canvas 15 3/4 x 19 11/16 in. Private Collection, New York © 2008 Marlene Dumas  |
