MARLENE DUMAS

B. 1953 - Marlene Dumas has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally. "Name No Names", organized by the Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne and De Pont Foundation for Contemporary Art in The Netherlands, is a broad survey of the artist's works on paper, nearly one hundred drawings, collages, and watercolors dating from the late seventies to 2002 toured to Tilburg, Paris, and New York. Many of her works were just donated to MOCA in Los Angeles and are in the Blake Byrne Permanent Collection. The relation between art and female beauty, art and pornography, female models and models of art, all have been a constant theme for Marlene Dumas. Her work recalls the painterly gestures of Expressionism, whilst combining the critical distance of Conceptual art with the pleasures of eroticism. Some of her images are derived from Polaroids of friends and lovers, others from glossy magazines and porno pictures. Through her delicately painted oil-on-canvas or ink-and-watercolor works on the female form, as well as, portraits of children and erotic scenes, she comments on the state of painting today.