Layers of Meaning

Marlene Dumas

"I paint because I am a woman.
(It's a logical necessity.)
If painting is female and insanity is a female malady, then all women painters are mad and all male painters are women.
I paint because I am an artificial blonde woman.
(Brunettes have no excuse.)
If all good painting is about color then bad painting is about having the wrong color. But bad things can be good excuses. As Sharon Stone said, "Being blonde is a great excuse. When you're having a bad day you can say, I can't help it, I'm just feeling very blonde today."
I paint because I am a country girl.
(Clever, talented big-city girls don't paint.)... "

The above is part of a postcard by South African born artist, Marlene Dumas. New York Times article, Marlene Dumas's Number Comes Up brought her to my attention with the startling and refreshing news: "...Marlene Dumas, a 51-year-old South African-born painter who now bears the odd distinction of commanding the highest price for a living female artist at auction.
In 2002, the record for Ms. Dumas's paintings, only a few of which had come to auction, stood at about $50,000. Yet last month at Christie's in London, after a bidding war between two dealers, her 1987 painting "The Teacher," a rendering of a posed class photograph, went for a startling $3.34 million." Wow!

This is good news for those of us who see the high art world as (traditionally) dominated by white men. Dumas is a foreigner and paints blatantly erotic imagery. These two factors do lower the bar for entry into the men's club of high dollar art. Europe has long been comfortable with buying the works of women artists and - sex sells. But there is much more to Dumas' work than a simple formula of sexual exploration. She is an artist who is successful at getting others to glimpse the world through her world view. She creates head-shot portraits and are riveting and revealing.

"...Dumas has cultivated a unique position within the world of figurative painting since the early 1980s, focusing on how the human body is translated into an image. Dumas does not use models, but instead takes her images from mass media and popular culture sources, particularly newspapers and television. According to Dumas, "what interested me was to make a statement about peoples' frames of mind and the relationships between them." Dumas' pictures impress with their urgent realism--but within their provocative energy lurk provocative questions about gender, identity, oppression, sexual and ethnic violence, and the situation of women and minorities; Dumas is always seeking to initiate new thought processes and critical strategies." from the book One Hundred Models and Endless Rejects

For a 2002 show of Dumas' works, The New Museum wrote, "Dumas's words and images refuse singular meaning, yet they frame serious political and ethical questions about apartheid, race, gender, and sexuality. By retaining- even insisting on- ambiguity, Dumas skillfully keeps complicated, open questions just that: questions."