Marlene Dumas is a South African-born, Amsterdam-based painter, and one of the Netherland's most internationally admired contemporary artists. Dumas recalls in her work the painterly gestures of Expressionism, whilst combining the critical distance of Conceptual Art with the pleasures of eroticism. Through her delicately painted oil-on-canvas or ink-and-watercolour works on the female form as well as portraits of children and erotic scenes, she comments on the state of painting today. Her affinity for language has formed an integral part of her work as a visual artist and over the last fifteen years she has written an impressive number of texts ranging from aphorisms and short poetic pieces to longer analytical texts, many of which are included in this monograph. Dutch art critic Dominic van den Boogerd surveys themes in Dumas's work in relation to a range of conceptual legacies in depictions of the human body and New York artist Barbara Bloom interviews Dumas on questions contemporary women artists are asked, from issues of intellectual process to the representation of the self.
This the first major monograph done about Marlene Dumas.