MARLENE DUMAS
The Second Coming

Published by Frith Street Books
ISBN 0-9514953-2-1
£ 25.00

If we get to heaven and meet the Big Bright Light what will it be - the eyes of the saints or the flash of a camera?

I'm calling it 'The Second Coming'. Perhaps it sounds less sincere. Does anybody who knows the Bible really still believe the Messiah will actually come down to earth (again)? Yet, I do, more than often work with religious connotations. Remember my '(In search of) the perfect lover'? Yes it also has sexual connotations (another common element on most of my work.) Remember my first solo show at Frith Street Gallery called MD-light (1999)? If these attempts towards pleasure made way for anxiety and fear in my shows Time and Again (2002) and Suspect (Venice 2003) I could not let it end this way. I had to rise up and come again and insist that whatever life is about you can't make art if you're dead.

Yes, I've been inspired by Caravaggio's 'Santa Lucia' (1606) for my portrait called 'Lucy' and by one of Gerhard Richter's magazine sources from the series '18 Oct 1976', for 'Stern' and by an anonymous Russian for my painting called 'Alfa.' But to understand what the work means is to look at the relationship between the technological source material (i.e.: photographic models) and the meta-physical imagination (of the artist) it's associative rather than descriptive, it's about the physical qualities of the actual works coming together in the cultural space of the exhibition.

For us to resurrect or make new meanings from the ashes of the old, you'll have to come again, too.

Marlene Dumas

© 2005 Frith Street Gallery