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"In the movies everything is larger than life and yet you experience that as realistic"

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Marlene Dumas - Jule-die Vrou - Contemporary Art

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South African artist who now lives in Amsterdam.

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Who is she?

Marlene Dumas is a South African artist who now lives in Amsterdam. She is one of Holland's most prolific artists.

What does she do?

She creates figurative works inspired by personal memories and a diverse array of printed matter including Polaroid photographs, newspaper and magazine cuttings, letters and Flemish paintings. Previously her subjects have spanned newborn babies, models, strippers and figures from popular culture, both alive and dead. Predominantly, she works in oil on canvas and ink on paper.

Marlene Dumas
The First People (I-IV), 1990
Oil on canvas

Collection De Pont Museum, Tilburg. Photography: Peter Cox

What are her key works?

The First People 1990, a quadriptych of oil paintings, each capturing a newborn baby. Each canvas measures a giant 180cm x 90cm.

Portrait Heads is a large series of inkwash drawings that Dumas began in 1991. The first set in the series was Black Drawings 1991-2 a collection of 114 portraits of black men and women.

The Painter 1994 is an oil on canvas work of a little girl, naked except for patches of paint, suggesting the subject is both the model and the painter.

What is 'The Image as Burden'?

An oil on canvas work depicting a figure carrying another in their arms, completed by Dumas in 1993. Though the gender of the two is relatively ambiguous, the subjects are said to represent Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor from George Cukor's romantic drama Camille (1936).

Dumas chose the name of the work as the title of the exhibition to capture the complexity of the relationship between painting and image.

I wanted to give more attention to what the painting does to the image, not only to what the image does to the painting.
Marlene Dumas

What are her thoughts on paintings?

I would like my paintings to be like poems. Poems are like sentences that have taken their clothes off. The meaning of a poem is what its beat and rhythm do. How the words move on the page. Poetry is writing that breathes and makes jumps and leaves spaces open, so we can read between the lines.
Marlene Dumas

What are her thoughts on live models?

I worry about what they think of me and I get even more worried about they think, I think of them. And then I lose the freedom of the amoral touch which for me is a prerequisite for making a good painting.
Marlene Dumas

What are the recurring themes within her work?

Race, sexuality, guilt and innocence, violence and tenderness.

What do the critics say?

There is a heaviness to the paintings of the South African-born, Dutch-based artist Marlene Dumas, as if they might fall off the wall and break the floor.
Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, December 2008

Here are swollen pot-bellies and ribs that look like xylophones, wattled chins and twisted - even broken - necks. Some hold extremely graphic sexual poses. Others are blindfolded, or bound in duct tape. And every so often, there comes, transfixingly, a notorious face: Osama bin Laden, Naomi Campbell, Phil Spector with wig, and without. Dumas's portraits tend to be contextless, her subjects' faces and limbs floating disembodied, arranged for maximum drama on a washed-out backdrop.
Rachel Cooke, The Guardian, January 2015

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.
Claire Messud, The New York Times, August 2014

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Marlene Dumas is a South African artist who now lives in Amsterdam. She is one of Holland's most prolific artists. She creates figurative works inspired by personal memories and a diverse array of printed matter including Polaroid photographs, newspaper and magazine cuttings, letters and Flemish paintings.

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“Modest Livelihood is a completely silent, visually stunning and absolutely humbling cinematic escape into the Canadian wilderness." -Kitty Scott, AGO curator of modern and contemporary art

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Brian Jungen lives and works between Vancouver and Fort St. John and has shown nationally and internationally in major solo and group exhibitions. Using reclaimed materials and creating a hybridity of meaning in these objects, Jungen's work evokes cultural traditions and points to the link between the social and environmental effects of our globalized trade in mass-produced objects and the power that such commodities transmit.

Duane Linklater is Omaskêko Cree, from Moose Cree First Nation in Northern Ontario and is currently based in North Bay, Ontario. He has attended the University of Alberta, receiving a Bachelor of Native Studies and a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a focus on painting. Linklater also attended the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College in upstate New York, USA, completing his Master of Fine Arts in Film and Video.

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Brian Jungen lives and works between Vancouver and Fort St. John and has shown nationally and internationally in major solo and group exhibitions. Using reclaimed materials and creating a hybridity of meaning in these objects, Jungen's work evokes cultural traditions and points to the link between the social and environmental effects of our globalized trade in mass-produced objects and the power that such commodities transmit.

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Works and lives in North Okanagan, BC, Canada.

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Born in Fort St. John, British Columbia, in 1970. Lives and works in Vancouver and Fort St. John.

Sculptor and multidisciplinary artist Brian Jungen employs repurposed materials and a combination of contemporary and traditional techniques; the resulting works often prompt viewers to consider the distances and proximities between cultures, as well as those between humans and nature. A member of the Doig River band of the Dane-zaa First Nation, Jungen came to prominence in the mid-to-late 1990s with a series of masks made of Nike sneakers-a comment, in part, on his own mixed European-Dane-zaa heritage, as well as on the impact of global capitalism on Aboriginal cultures and communities. Later works, shown at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the New Museum and Tate Modern, among other venues, include giant whale skeletons made of plastic lawn chairs, totem poles made of golf bags and a teepee made of black sofa leather. Recent work focuses on conceptual and modernist forms and their relationship to so-called "primitivism." Among other honours, Jungen won the first Sobey Art Award in 2002 and received the Gershon Iskowitz Prize in 2010. In 2012, he was included in dOCUMENTA (13).

Brian Jungen with Duane Linklater in the film Modest Livelihood (2012). Courtesy of the artists and the Walter Phillips Gallery/Banff Centre.

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Born in Fort St. John, British Columbia, in 1970. Lives and works in Vancouver and Fort St. John. Sculptor and multidisciplinary artist Brian Jungen employs repurposed materials and a combination of contemporary and traditional techniques; the resulting works often prompt viewers to consider the distances and proximities between cultures, as well as those between humans and nature.

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"Heavy objects, they move really quick. Lighter objects, they're super slow moving."

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Works and lives in Mexico City, Mexico.

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Why would an artist leave the greatest city in the world? Artist Alejandro Almanza Pereda lives out his own personal Escape from New York​ (1981)-the John Carpenter classic cult film-completing a big mission before time runs out. ​From his Hunter College MFA studio in Tribeca, Almanza Pereda recalls how the retro-future action film had a big impact on him as a kid growing up in Mexico. Set in a dystopian Manhattan that's been turned into a prison, the film features anti-hero character Snake Plissken whose mission is to rescue the President before the time lapse bomb implanted in Plissken's body explodes. Almanza Pereda sees today's New York City as an inaccessible prison of a different sort: "It's become a playground for really privileged people." Almanza Pereda describes the disheartening, socially isolating environment that artists in New York now face.

With exorbitant rents for barely adequate studio spaces, artists are forced to maximize their time by either making money or art, with little opportunity to partake in the larger creative community that attracted them to the city in the first place. But like any good New Yorker, Almanza Pereda optimizes his best remaining asset-the three weeks that remain in his Hunter studio-and embarks on an ambitious new project before moving to Mexico City. He creates a DIY plywood aquarium in which he photographs classic table-top still lives featuring his own treasured knickknacks and produce sourced from nearby Chinatown. Staging his arrangements upside down and underwater, Almanza Pereda is able to circumvent the rules of gravity in favor of a alternative world where objects counterintuitively float and sink. At times melancholy, sublime, and unpredictable, Almanza Pereda's still lives mirror his own bittersweet feelings about leaving New York: sadness over the loss of friends leavened with the promise of adventures in a new city.

More information and credits

Featuring music by Almanza Pereda's band La Rubia te Besa and the artist's video Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all (2014).

Credits

Art21 New York Close Up Created & Produced by: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Editor:. Cinematography: Nick Ravich & Andrew Whitlatch. Sound: Nick Ravich. Design & Graphics: CRUX Studio & Open. Artwork: Alejandro Almanza Pereda. Music: La Rubia te Besa, Jose Luis Cortes, Jose Antonio Elguezabal, Roberto Galindo, & Juan Matus (Yodex). Thanks: Arizona State University Art Museum International Artist Residency at Combine Studios, Rowan Burkam, Natalee Cayton, Abelardo Cruz-Santiago, Greg Esser, Reiko Hamano, Hunter College, Sheetal Khanna-Ravich, Gordon Knox, Carrie Marill, Maira Monroy, Matthew Moore, Julio Cesar Morales, Lateral Move, Estrella Payton, Wayne & Alison Rainey, Birgit Rathsmann, Morgan Riles, Arkadiy Ryabin, Claudia Peña Salinas, Seung Yeon Huh, STUDIOCANAL & Zach Trow. An ART21 Workshop Production. © Art21, Inc. 2015. All rights reserved.

Art21 New York Close Up is supported, in part, by The Lambent Foundation; the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; and by individual contributors.

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Alejandro Almanza Pereda was born in 1977 in Mexico City. He formerly worked in New York, and currently lives and works between the United States and Mexico, maintaining his practice in both locales. Searching out vintage objects in flea markets and thrift stores, Almanza Pereda integrates mundane materials into large-scale sculptures that challenge both the durability of the objects and his ability to create a stable structure. Finding inspiration in the objects he selects, Almanza Pereda eschews narrative and prefers to focus on materiality.

Alejandro Almanza Pereda discusses the creation of Everything but the kitchen sank, his 2015 series of still lifes shot upside down, underwater, and featured in the 2015 New York Close Up film, " Alejandro Almanza Escapes from New York."

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Alejandro Almanza Pereda

"I think everybody in the world should live in New York, for at least one or two years, to just kind of make sense of it.

But, it's not the only lifestyle you can have. It's not the only way of doing things."

Art21 is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization; all donations are tax deductible to the fullest extent of the law.

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Alejandro Almanza Pereda Escapes from New York - Art21

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Art21 is a celebrated global leader in presenting thought-provoking and sophisticated content about contemporary art, and the go-to place to learn first-hand from the artists of our time. A nonprofit organization, Art21's mission is to inspire a more creative world through the works and words of contemporary artists.