Marlene Dumas The Image as Burden /anglais - Softcover

GREENBERG KERRYN

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1849762562 ISBN 13: 9781849762564

Publisher: TATE, 2014

Synopsis

Marlene Dumas (b.1953) is widely acknowledged as one of the most influential artists working today. In an era dominated by the mass media and proliferation of images, her work is a testament to the meaning and potency of painting. Her tense, psychologically-charged works explore themes such as sexuality, love, death and grief, often referencing art history, popular culture and current affairs. The title of this catalogue is derived from Dumas's work The Image as Burden 1993, which refers to the conflict between painterly gesture and the illusion of the painted image. Dumas wants to put emphasis on 'what the painting does to the image, rather than what the image does to the painting'.

The Image as Burden accompanies a retrospective of the same name taking place at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Tate Modern, London and Foundation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel. It is the first publication to give a chronological overview of Marlene Dumas's career through carefully selected texts and images grouped together around her solo exhibitions. Texts published in magazines, newspapers and books over a period of more than thirty-five years in many different languages are brought together for the first time in this book. A timeline with references to significant moments in art, culture, politics and Dumas's personal life offers a deeper insight into the context of Marlene Dumas's practice of the last forty years.

The catalogue also includes a new interview with the artist by Theodora Vischer, and essay by Leontine Coelewij, and Barton Springs, a specially-commisioned piece of writing by the award-winning Irish novelist Colm
Tóibín in response to Dumas's work.

About this title

Review

A catalogue of intense, psychologically-charged paintings, which mix art history with popular culture and current affairs. (Victoria Sadler Huffington Post)

The accompanying catalog―edited by the exhibition curators Leontine Coelewij of the Stedelijk Museum, Helen Sainsbury of Tate Modern and Theodora Vischer of the Fondation Beyeler―is a necessity. It contains many additional images and a large selection of Ms. Dumas’s oblique, witty, deeply engaging writings. (Karen Wilkin The Wall Street Journal)

The Image as a Burden, published on the occasion for her current European retrospective, surveys her career from her student work of the early 70's through the ongoing series Great Men. Commentary by scholars and friends accompanies Dumas's own reflections and poems, and a detailed time line runs through the margins. Here, very personal developments are charted alongside world events-watershed moments in the art world and the apartheid state alike-lending the book an unexpected and great scrapbook intimacy. (Johanna Fateman Bookforum)

One of the most provocative painters of the human form, the South African–born artist Marlene Dumas doesn’t match the stereotype of artist as solitary genius. Her way is chaotic, more responsive and uncertain ― and that is her brilliance.

Perhaps the most celebrated living female painter of the human form, and certainly one of the most provocative contemporary artists, Dumas, in her public persona, doesn’t seem given to doubt. She is known for her unflinching approach to sex and death; for portraits of sex workers, corpses and terrorists, among other subjects; for the washed texture of her often thinned paint; for the unloveliness of her palette. (Claire Messud The New York Times: T Magazine)

Edition details

• Publisher: TATE
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1849762562
• ISBN 13: 9781849762564
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 195