During an overflow lecture last night at MoMA in advance of her retrospective Measuring Your Own Grave, Marlene Dumas said it's not as gloomy as the title sounds; her pictures are often about the nature of painting and in some sense
the measure of the grave is the size of the canvas. She believes her
figures are "very aware" that they are two dimensional creations in a
painting. She added, "I'm not Dr. Frankenstein. I don't
think I'm going to create this being that's 'Alive!'"
Also, I should mention, some of her subjects are corpses. Her starting points for paintings are usually old photos, including those of dead bodies, though viewers could read several as sleeping. Her portraits of men and children are startling, yet the media obsesses on her depictions of prostitutes and her inspiration from pornography (which she calls "my angrily friendly works"), because she is a woman.
In fact, her picture The Visitor holds the world record for the highest price paid for work by a living female artist, $6.3 million. For comparison, the highest price paid for a painting by a living male artist is $85.6 million, for Jasper Johns' False Start.
Born and raised in South Africa, a longtime resident of Amsterdam, the fifty-five year old Dumas seems naturally at ease with gay topics and male sexuality, even at an early age. She showed a video clip of Gilbert & George explaining their methods and nodded vigorously when they said they might keep an image five or six years before they knew how to use it. Discussing a painting by Caravaggio, she said, "He loved men. So he places these beautiful big male figures in front, and only puts the woman, tiny, here in back."
She surprised some listeners last night by saying, "Sometimes I think I'm not a real artist because I'm too half-hearted and never know where I am."
The show, which opens on Wednesday to members and on Sunday to the public, will be up through February 16.
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