Frith Street Gallery

b. 1953, Capetown, South Africa

The relation between art and female beauty, art and pornography, female models and models of art 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-watercolour works on the female form as well as portraits of children and imagery from contemporary events, she comments on the state of painting today.

A retrospective exhibition of Marlene Dumas’ work will be on show at The Menil Collection, Houston, TX, from 27 March – 21 June 2009. This exhibition travels from MOCA, Los Angeles and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Other recent solo exhibition Include South African National Gallery, Cape Town, Standard Bank, Johannesburg and Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Kagawa, Japan. Dumas’ works are in many important collections including Tate Gallery; De Pont Foundation, NL; Centre Pompidou, Paris and the Art Institute of Chicago.

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