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Published in The Church Times, 4th November 2011
Dumas’s work is both bold and fragile, brash and delicate; passages of cool minimalism — blank spaces and unpainted charcoal lines — combine with the textured gestural brushstrokes of vigorous expressionism: a stylistic both/and that complements her imagistic exploration of the reality of paradox.
http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/content.asp?id=120059
Related Exhibitions: Marlene Dumas: Forsaken
Published in Time Out, November, 2011
A powerful show of paintings, ‘Forsaken’ pits Jesus against Phil Spector, Amy Winehouse and Osama bin Laden. Ossian Ward enters an arena of doubt and talks to the artist Marlene Dumas
http://www.timeout.com/london/art/event/240057/marlene-dumas-forsaken
Related Exhibitions: Marlene Dumas: Forsaken
Published in The L Magazine, March 2010
The installation is all about the opening up of space-with seventeen canvases varying in size and subject matter from tiny still lives to massive landscapes spread generously around four airy rooms-while the paintings themselves deal with the abrupt truncating and curtailing of space. The wall of the exhibition title refers specifically to structures in the Middle East that keep populations apart, serve as pilgrimage sites and force arbitrary divisions onto previously fluid territories.
http://www.thelmagazine.com/newyork/marlene-dumas-jumps-the-wall/Content?oid=1569644
Published in Flash Art, March - April 2009
Marlene Dumas’s work opposes a society that simplistically divided good from bad, and it resists political or ideological systems that teach brainless love or hate schemes. We find the resluts of such beliefs in paintings like The Pilgrim (2006), The Neighbour or the Look-Alike (both 2005).
Published in Associated Press, 25 December 2008
Like most of her works, the stunning “Measuring Your Own Grave” (2003) is based on a photograph. Painted in black and white, a dancer takes a graceful bow, leaning over at the waist; we see the top of her head, her arms stretched, pushing against the edge of the canvas. It’s an innocuous scene, painted from what we can only assume was a happy moment, but Dumas’ title changes all that.
http://www.projo.com/art/content/wk-dumas_show_at_MOMA_12-25-08_A2CKEV1_v13.6f1f777.html
Published in Bloomberg.com, 12 December 2008
Working from news photographs as well as her own snapshots and Polaroids, Dumas takes on Big Themes—sex, death, birth, race, motherhood—without sensationalizing or sentimentalizing them.
Her figures are anonymous but unmistakable, isolated in extreme close-up on monochromatic backgrounds and distinguished by blurred edges, bleeding veils of paint and physical characteristics that she distorts for emotional effect without resorting to caricature.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=akTIRWk6WQuw&refer=muse
Published in The Huffington Post, 26 June 2008
But she has asked herself, how do you paint the end of a relationship? How do you indicate without words, what two people have meant to each other? And she manages to do it, rendering the awful pain of separating from someone you thought you would be close to forever by juxtaposing the head of one lover on top of another, no longer side by side, looking in entirely different directions.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/patricia-zohn/culture-zohn-marlene-duma_b_108975.html
Published in The Los Angeles Times, 25 June 2008
“Leather Boots” (2000) shows a busty nude woman in profile squatting inside a narrow space and wearing only what the title says. A cascade of black hair tumbles down her back, and she’s framed by the black walls of what might be a peep-show booth. Yet her torso is backed by a vaporous veil of lovely sunrise color—peachy pink lifting into radiant yellow, which puts you in mind of the intimate intensity of a Rothko.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-et-dumas25-2008jun25,0,4194446.story
Published in New York Times, 15 June 2008
[Dumas’] paintings can be defined in terms of what she has rejected from her surroundings. She strips away anecdotal detail… until all that is left is a haunting gaze.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/magazine/15dumas-t.html?pagewanted=1&ref=design
Published in Frieze, 29 November 2007
Occasionally prostrated, Dumas’ dead are both generic and specific, at once recalling the nameless humanity of Iraq and the now derelict tropes of painting.
Yet, scattered amongst the many bodies displayed on Dumas’ first solo exhibition in her native South Africa, there is a sampling of cherished subjects, ‘Intimate Relations’ as the title of this overdue survey reminds us.
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