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<p>The world-renowned painter Marlene Dumas is undoubtedly one of today's most interesting artists. She was born in Cape Town in 1953 and moved to Amsterdam in 1976. It was in the Netherlands she had her breakthrough in the mid 80s. Marlene Dumas is known for her investigative paintings that are usually based on photographs of relatives, famous people or events depicted in the media, not seldom controversial.</p>
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<p>In 2014, at the Stedelijk museum in Amsterdam, I saw a huge Dumas retrospective that has been touring all over Europe, called "The Image as Burden", with nearly 200 of her paintings and drawings. Besides books and internet pages, that's my only up-close encounter with her art.</p>
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<p>Her own daughter is the model for <em>"The painter"</em> who's been dipping her hands in paint. Or is it blood? Dumas is always seeking the ambiguous, and is never shying away from the difficult and taboos. Her artistic focus has always been the human body, in oil, in watercolor and in countless drawings. Her drawings are spontaneous, often beautiful images. They are made quickly, and when she paints in watercolor it's wet on wet. Her physical and technically brilliant paintings are very much flesh and blood, she portrays whores and madonnas in a way that feels intimate and tangible. Sex and death, Eros and Thanatos, is somewhat of a combustion engine in the history of art, where creation and annihilation have produced artistic energy through centuries of painting, and Dumas is no exception.</p>
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<p>Since the mid 1980s Marlene Dumas has had a unique position on the figurative painting scene. Dumas doesn't use models, but instead draws from her own photo archive, and from mass media and popular culture. Her work can be psychologically unsettling, and often raise provocative questions about gender, identity, oppression and sexual and ethnic violence. She's always looking for new ideas and critical strategies. Marlene Dumas blurs the boundaries between painting and drawing. Thin lines and shapes blend seamlessly with the volatile sweeps of color and thick, powerful brushstrokes. By simplifying and distorting her subjects Dumas creates a sort of intimacy through alienation. She's a master of exposing the longing, vulnerability and shortcomings that we all carry.</p>
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<p>The key moments, or camera clicks, that immortalized and encapsulated a section of time is her tool box, in the form of newspaper clippings, adverts, pornography, celebrity magazines and postcards. These nurture her imagery that with tactile precision translate or sublimate the moments and render them the opportunity to expand spatially and temporally. With a controlled and precise touch the paintings almost seem to be enticed from their motifs with an uncomplicated ease. Words and texts also belong to Marlene Dumas domain, commenting and poetizing the subject at hand.</p>
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<p>She often talks about the upbringing conditions in South African and the impact of living in a racially divided society. At the same time she testifies about an isolated world, where television, the moving news, reached South Africa first in the 1970s when she was about to leave. It was the printed image that portrayed the world. It's radically different from the constant image flow of today, where the iconic portrait doesn't take hold as easily.</p>
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<p>She's a defender of the universally human, from a bottom-up perspective, highlighting those that need to be comforted, and that are at the mercy of injustice. She has a great sensitivity for the drive and desire for love, success and life, as well as for the fear of and fascination with failure and death. Private experiences are often used to describe the universally human. With simple coloristic means, Dumas succeeds to show the duality that lives inside every human being, and that in many ways represents our actual essence. Whether you're a celebrity, a blue collar, a white collar, a Jew, Muslim, Christian or atheist, the human experience is very much the same at a basic level.</p>
<p>— SteemSwede</p>
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<p> The pictures in their order: </p>
<ol>
<li>"Genetic Longing", 1984</li>
<li>"The Painter", 1994 & "Helena", 2001</li>
<li>"Losing (Her Meaning)", 1988</li>
<li>"The Visitor", 1995</li>
<li>"Nuclear Family", 2013</li>
<li>"The Trophy", 2013</li>
<li>"The White Disease", 1985 & "Moshekwa", 2006</li>
<li>"Skulls", 2013-2015</li>
<li>"Adult Entertainment", 2000 & "10 inch", 1999</li>
<li>"Jesus Serene", 1994</li>
<li>"Waiting for Meaning", 1988 </li>
</ol>
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