Painter · South Africa
Marlene Dumas
Marlene Dumas (born 1953) is a South African-born painter who has lived in Amsterdam since 1976. Working from photographs — newspaper images, film stills, pornography, Polaroids of friends — she paints faces and bodies in loose, liquid washes of ink and oil, and her work on race, sexuality, violence, love and death has made her one of the most influential painters alive.
Updated 3 min read
From Kuils River to Amsterdam
Marlene Dumas was born in Cape Town in 1953 and grew up on a wine farm at Kuils River, outside the city. She studied art at the University of Cape Town from 1972 to 1975, under apartheid, and in 1976 left for the Netherlands on a scholarship to the Ateliers '63 in Haarlem, where she worked until 1978. She has lived in Amsterdam ever since, but South Africa — its politics, its racial categories, its violence — has never left her work.
Painting from photographs
Dumas almost never paints from life. She works from photographs: images from newspapers and magazines, film stills, pornography, art history and her own snapshots of friends and family. Painting quickly, with thin, wet layers of oil or ink that run and bleed, she turns them into something less certain: faces that seem to stare back, bodies that are at once vulnerable and powerful.
Among her best-known works are The Painter (1994), a portrait of her young daughter with paint-stained hands, and large series of heads and figures: children, models, the dead, political prisoners and terrorists, Christ, her mother. Her subjects are those of the news and of private life, and she refuses to keep them apart.
How to look at a Dumas: take the title seriously, because the titles are part of the work, and read the paint as a record of speed. The thin, wet layers mean that a face can be sharp in one place and dissolve in another, as if the image were still arriving or already fading. Reviewers of her Tate show described her as reclaiming anonymous bodies from the media images she starts from; that is a good question to bring to each picture: who is this person, and who first made the photograph she is working from? Black Drawings (1991–92), shown at Tate, makes the point at wall scale: a series of sullen faces, symbols and marks that covers a gallery wall.
Her student years in Cape Town and her career in Amsterdam give her work a double position: a South African-born painter who has spent most of her life in Europe, and who keeps asking who looks, who is looked at and who has the right to paint another person. That reading is this site's, not a claim by the artist.
Recognition
Dumas represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale in 1995. Her retrospective Measuring Your Own Grave opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in June 2008 and moved to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in December 2008, then to the Menil Collection in Houston in 2009. The Image as Burden, which took its title from a work of 1993, opened at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2014 and then went to Tate Modern in London and the Fondation Beyeler near Basel in 2015. In 2022–23 the Palazzo Grassi in Venice staged a large solo show, Open End, from 27 March 2022 to 8 January 2023.
Her prices have followed. At Sotheby's in London on 1 July 2008 her painting The Visitor (1995) sold for £3.18 million, then the record for a living woman artist. In May 2025 Miss January (1997) sold at Christie's in New York for $13.63 million, the highest price paid for one of her paintings so far.
Where to see the work
The museums that have staged her surveys, the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, Tate Modern, the Fondation Beyeler and the Palazzo Grassi, are the best places to start; check their collection pages for what is on view, because works on paper are shown only for short periods.
See also
William Kentridge; our guide to African women artists; Irma Stern, the pioneering South African modernist painter of an earlier generation; and our lists of South African painters and South African artists.
