Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden — artfund.org

Far from literal portraits, the artist's depictions of the human figure reflect upon love, death, gender, sexuality and the influence of mass media and celebrity. For Marlene Dumas portraiture is not part of a wider oeuvre, portraiture is a single obsession. Even as a child she sought only to represent the face or figure. ‘I never did a tree,’ she told the New York Times in 2008. And yet she is not like other portrait artists. Rarely working from life, she finds her subjects in newspapers and magazines or recreates her daughter from old photographs. She admits to knowing little about colour, instead using it intuitively. Her work – intense and at times unsettling – captures a mood as much as a physical presence. For example, the series of weeping women she produced in the year after her mother died, her heartbreak spilling out across the canvas.

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