Marlene Dumas

I never meant to stay
I suppose that's what they all say.

It was my first time in a peepshow
so when the girl smiled at me
I said "Only looking" and she replied
"That's how I got started here too".

marlene dumas | images and words

ZENO X GALLERY

Bacon and Dumas or The discomfort of being "coupled"

Marlene Dumas: Name No Names

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. Working in what has been called a neo-expressionist, conceptualist style, Dumas has been written about as sharing traits with such diverse artists as Jenny Holzer, Emil Nolde, Barbara Kruger, Edvard Munch, Barbara Bloom, and Francis Bacon. Her recent depictions of strippers and prostitutes are phantoms of Egon Schiele's muses from the early twentieth century. Dorothy D-lite (1998), bent-over double, vulva displayed, emerges from the thin inkwash as if she were a flickering light. In Under the Volcano (1998), death and sex merge forces; the skin of the stripper has been infused with a fiery glow, and she peers back over her shoulder at the viewer, beckoning ghoulishly with vacant eyes and too-white teeth. Dumas's strippers, drawn after snapshots she took herself in the red-light district of Amsterdam, are most definitely naked, and most definitely engaged in the trafficking of cheap thrills. Marlene Dumas wouldn't have it any other way.

I am against:general ideas
the nude
the appropriation of images
the mystification of the untitled
the glorification of artistic doubt
the fuzzy edges of sensitivity
old sins
and useless guilt.

The Private versus the Public

ZENO X GALLERY