The personal exhibition of Marlene Dumas (27 March 2022 – 08 January 2023), the contemporary artist born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1953 and considered one of the most significant and authoritative artists in the contemporary art scene.
The exhibition at Palazzo Grassi is part of the monographic program dedicated to great contemporary artists which began in 2012 and is promoted by Pinault Collection.
There are no less than 100 works – with a selection of paintings and drawings made since 1984 – which are exhibited in the exhibition entitled “open-end” and curated by Caroline Bourgeois in collaboration with Marlene Dumas. Many works are unpublished and from the Pinault Collection, international museums and private collections.
Marlene Dumas grew up in South Africa and studied fine art during the brutal apartheid regime. In 1976 she reaches Europe to continue her studies and settles in Amsterdam, where she settles permanently. The first years of her career she devoted herself to collage and text works, later she preferred the technique of oil on canvas and ink on paper. Her works and portraits intrinsic to despair, fears and sufferings that leave the viewer in deep reflection.
The use of images from which she is inspired are usually Polaroid images taken by her but also others from newspapers, magazines and cinematographic stills. Of her work she declares: “I am an artist who uses second-hand images and first-rate experiences” The themes she deals with range from love to death, violence or tenderness and no less gender and racial issues, all within news stories or art history. For Marlene Dumas, painting is a very physical act, which has to do with eroticism and her different stories.
Marlene Dumas' work draws from human figures the different paradoxes of the most intense emotions: "Painting is the trace of human touch, it is the skin of a surface. A painting is not a postcard."
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog published in co-edition by Palazzo Grassi – Punta della Dogana in collaboration with Marsilio Editori, Venice.
