Marlene Dumas is considered one of the most significant and influential painters working today. With her work, she gives new content to the meaning that painting can still have today, in an era dominated by visual culture.
Featured with a solo show at the 2022 Venice Biennale
https://www.labiennale.org/en
127 YEARS OF HISTORY
La Biennale di Venezia has been for over 120 years one of the most prestigious cultural institutions in the world. Established in 1895, the Biennale has an attendance today of over 500,000 visitors at the Art Exhibition. The history of the La Biennale di Venezia dates back from 1895, when the first International Art Exhibition was organized. In the 1930s new festivals were born: Music, Cinema, and Theatre (the Venice Film Festival in 1932 was the first film festival in history). In 1980 the first International Architecture Exhibition took place, and in 1999 Dance made its debut at La Biennale.
The 59th Venice Biennale is an upcoming international contemporary art exhibition to be held between April and November 2022. The Venice Biennale takes place biennially in Venice, Italy. Artistic director Cecilia Alemani will curate its central exhibition. The Venice Biennale is an international art biennial exhibition held in Venice, Italy.
Palazzo Grassi presents “open-end”, a major monographic exhibition dedicated to Marlene Dumas, until 8 January 2023.
Palazzo Grassi presents the solo show dedicated to Marlene Dumas (1953, Cape Town, South Africa), as part of the cycle of monographic shows dedicated to major contemporary artists, launched in 2012 and alternating with thematic exhibitions of the Pinault Collection.
The exhibition, entitled “open-end”, is curated by Caroline Bourgeois in collaboration with Marlene Dumas. It brings together over 100 works and focuses on her whole pictorial production, with a selection of paintings and drawings created between 1984 and today, including unseen works made in the last few years. Presented over the two floors of Palazzo Grassi, the works exhibited come from the Pinault Collection, as well as from international museums and private collections.
Considered one of the most influential artists on the contemporary art scene, Marlene Dumas was born in 1953 in Cape Town, South Africa. She grew up and studied fine arts during the brutal Apartheid regime. In 1976, she came to Europe for further studies and settled in Amsterdam, where she still lives and works. If in the early years of her career she was known for her collages and texts, Marlene Dumas today works mainly with oil on canvas and ink on paper. Her work largely consists of portraits, which are universal representations of suffering, ecstasy, fear, desperation, but are also often comments on the act of painting itself. A crucial aspect of her work is her use of images from which she draws inspiration, be it in newspapers, magazines, film stills, films or polaroids she herself has taken. Of her work she says: “I am an artist who uses second-hand images and first-hand emotions”. (1) Love and death, gender and race, innocence and blame, violence and tenderness are the major questions she raises, and which combine the intimate sphere with socio-political aspects, news stories and main topics of art history. Her work is based on an awareness that the endless flow of images we see daily impacts our perception of ourselves and our ability to read the world. For her, painting is a very physical act, revolving around eroticism and its different histories.
Marlene Dumas’ work focuses on the representation of human figures dealing with the most intense emotions and paradoxes: “Painting is about the trace of the human touch. It is about the skin of a surface. A painting is not a postcard.” (2)
The exhibition catalogue is co-edited by Palazzo Grassi – Punta della Dogana with Marsilio Arte, Venice.
Gallery Web Page: https://www.designboom.com/art/marlene-dumas-06-06-2022/
Dumas video: https://www.designboom.com/art/marlene-dumas-06-06-2022/
Next week:
Speaking your Metaphor
What is Metaphor? a thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else, especially something abstract.
Artist Nancy Spero
Nancy Spero in her studio.