Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave

by Cornelia Butler, Richard Shiff, Matthew Monahan

In her expressionistic drawings and paintings of the last three decades, acclaimed South African artist Marlene Dumas has focused on the human figure, probing themes of love, desire, despair and confusion in order to slyly critique social and political attitudes toward women, children, people of color and others who have historically been victimized. From her evocative portraits, based on photographs of friends and family as well as figures culled from printed pornography, to her large-scale images highlighting charged relationships within groups, Dumas' work explores the contradictions behind the physical reality of the body, merging acute social commentary with personal experience and art-historical antecedent to create unsettling and ambiguous psychological statements.
Accompanying Dumas' first major mid-career survey in the U.S., with stops in three major American cities, (one yet to be announced) this substantial, fully-illustrated publication features a newly commissioned essay by renowned scholar Richard Shiff, placing the artist's work in relation to both American figurative painting since the 1980s and Abstract Expressionism. The book also includes curator Cornelia H. Butler's examination of Dumas' photographic sources and shorter texts by Lisa Gabrielle Mark and Matthew Monahan. Writings by the artist, as well as an extensive illustrated exhibition history and bibliography, complete this comprehensive examination of the work of one of the most thought-provoking artists working today.
Born in Capetown, South Africa, in 1953, Marlene Dumas has lived in Amsterdam since 1976. Over the last three decades she has had numerous solo exhibitions throughout Europe and the U.S., including the Tate Gallery, London; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. In 1995 she represented The Netherlands at the 46th Venice Biennale.

Genres: Art

288 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2008

About the author

Cornelia H. "Connie" Butler is Chief Curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. From 2006-2013, she served as the Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, New York City). Prior to that, she was a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) from 1996-2005. Butler also held curatorial positions at the Neuberger Museum of Art (Purchase, New York), Artists Space (New York City), and the Des Moines Arts Center (Iowa). Her multimedia exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution dealt with international feminist art of the 1970s. Butler is a 1980 graduate of Marlborough School, and a 1984 graduate of Scripps College.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Grady · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not pretty pictures but Stunning Art!

This is a splendid monograph on the South African artists Marlene Dumas and represents a thorough mid career retrospective. It is a given that Dumas is one of the more important painters painting today, but the manner in which this book takes the reader on the journey of her development as an artist is as fine as any monograph on any artist in publication. Serving as a massive catalogue for the 2008 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the written word - in the form of Jeremy Strick's Introduction and the four essays by Cornelia Butler, Richard Shiff, Lisa Gabrielle Mark, and Matthew Monahan - is not only additive to the book, it is also additive to the exhibition. Few who take the time to read as well as peruse the many excellent color reproductions of Dumas' art as well as fragments of occasional instigating photographs that influences sectors of Dumas' art will come away less than overwhelmed by the content of the catalogue as well as the power of Marlene Dumas as an artist.

Butler opens her initial essay 'Painter as Witness' with an apropos quote by another artist observer of the human condition, Leon Golub: 'I was looking for images to somehow show the coruscating nature of what the world was about - in a way, survival, you see? And the savagery of war and the savagery of human relations in general...My dilemma was in the world of events, the event-world. How to make contact.' She then summarizes Dumas' power: 'Portraits of the living, portraits of the dead, horizontals, groups, dead girls, big babies, crying women - this is the shorthand, the typology of the subjects Marlene Dumas has used in her ongoing exploration of portraiture.' And after the power of his introduction the reader is gifted with nearly 300 pages of the works by this great artist. There are portraits of mankind at the brutal treatment of 'civilization', references to the struggles in South Africa, war in general, the degradation of prostitution, works that ponder on pornography in much the same influence as Egon Schiele. MEASURING YOUR OWN GRAVE is not only the title of one of the paintings in this exhibition and catalogue, it is also a thematic concern of Dumas. These are small works and monumental works that force us to face that part of the travels through life and the darker interstices we avoid. Marlene Dumas is a brilliant artist and even more: she is a contemporary philosopher and observer who is unafraid to make us look more closely at this globe on which we briefly live. Highly recommended.

Grady Harp

[Barry · Rating 3 out of 5]

You can read my review of the exhibition at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090302/schwabsky.

[Terence · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great resources about Dumas' source material. Good plates and prints. This is a great resource.