Marlene Dumas stars in a major solo exhibition at Palazzo Grassi

From March 27, 2022 to January 8, 2023, Marlene Dumas (Cape Town, 1953) will be featured in a major solo exhibition at Palazzo Grassi in Venice. Curated by Caroline Bourgeois in collaboration with the artist, the exhibition titled Open-end aims to retrace her pictorial production through more than one hundred works, including paintings and drawings, ranging from 1984 to the present and unpublished works created in recent years, from the Pinault Collection, international museums and private collections.

Among the most influential artists on the contemporary scene, Marlene Dumas was born in 1953 in Cape Town, South Africa, where she grew up and studied fine arts during the apartheid regime. In 1976 she moved to Europe to pursue her studies and settled in Amsterdam, where she still lives and works today. In the early years of his career he devoted himself to collages and texts, while today he works mainly with oil on canvas and ink on paper. Numerous portraits depict suffering, ecstasy, fear, and despair, but they are also often a commentary on the act of painting itself.

Dumas draws inspiration from images from newspapers, magazines, film stills or Polaroids taken by herself. Among the main themes she addresses are love and death, gender and racial issues, innocence and guilt, violence and tenderness: the intimate dimension is thus combined with sociopolitical facts, news events or art history. Her production is based on the awareness that the continuous flow of images by which we are invested daily interferes with our perception of ourselves and our way of reading the world. Painting is a very physical act for her, dealing with eroticism and its various histories.

Her art focuses on the representation of human figures in relation to the paradoxes of the most intense emotions.

For info: https://www.palazzograssi.it/it/

Image: Marlene Dumas, Losing (Her Meaning), detail (1988; oil on canvas, 50 x 70 cm). Courtesy of Peter Cox, Eindhoven, the Pinault Collection and the artist.

Marlene Dumas stars in a major solo exhibition at Palazzo Grassi

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