Marlene Dumas - Praying - Sold

Marlene Dumas (Cape Town 1953) is one of the most important and influential painters of our time. In the 1970s she came to the Netherlands to study at Ateliers '63 in Haarlem. After completing her studies, she settled in Amsterdam, where she still lives and works. The theme of contrast, which she had to deal with a lot during her life in South Africa during apartheid (whites versus blacks, cultural differences, confrontation of the sexes), influenced her work.

She mainly uses photographic sources such as self-made snapshots, Polaroid photos and thousands of photos torn from magazines and newspapers. However, her paintings are never a literal representation of the photos: for example, she crops the image and only uses a detail of the photo or she uses a different color palette. Her characteristic color palette is gray, blue and red. Her paintings and drawings have enormous directness and expressiveness, which she combines with a certain analytical distance. She does not avoid controversial topics.