God saw that art was all alone,
so he put him to sleep and gave him kitsch.

Or maybe, kitsch started with the fall from grace,
with the first denial, with the first stupid lie,
the first camouflage after Adam and Eve had
eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and [...]

My exhibition Mankind (2006) showed how every age produces it’s own ‘Most Wanted’ faces. The emphasis of this show was on male suspects.

In 2007 my mother died at noon at the age of 86.

For Whom the Bell Tolls (2008) was about loss [...]

The first mark is the worst.
The drawing of a line cuts the paper in two.
The drawing of maps and boarders turns neighbours into foreigners.
Within military cultures whole generations of children have grown up,
thinking only in enemy – images.

Art is a way of sleeping with the enemy.

[...]

I am the woman who does not know
where she wants to be buried anymore
When I was small, I wanted a big angel on my grave
with wings like in a Caravaggio painting.
Later I found that too pompous.
So I thought I’d rather have a cross.
Then [...]

Whether you start with a photographic source or not, that doesn’t change the basic assumption that a (modern) painter is more interested in images that in the actual living of modern life; and that painters are more interested in images than in the actual living of modern life; and that painters are more interested in [...]

A conversation between Steve McQueen and Marlene Dumas

M Steve, your film is called ‘Charlotte’. Can one speak of Charlotte Rampling specifically or not really?

S Well, obviously it has a lot to do with the actual person whose eye you see, of course. But then again if you didn’t know who Charlotte Rampling was [...]

Or: paintings of pictures that show that a painting isn’t a picture

Once upon a time, there was an American girl who came to Europe to further study her art. She worked for a while in a studio in Amsterdam where, before her, a Turkish-German girl had made paintings, in a building where an Irish [...]

Once upon a time, you didn’t exist
When I came here, to Holland (thirty years ago)
You didn’t yet exist here then
(your fathers did, but they were different)
You didn’t exist yet
As The Moroccan
As a specific group
As a concept
As a subject, as [...]

I wanted to call this show ‘Forever and Ever’.
I still think it’s nice,
because I never want to die
and I don’t want you to leave me ever,
and I believe art revolves around love stories.
I also believe that it’s not about
‘s there life after death?’

(a conversation on elitism and accessibility)

Who do you make your work for, he asked me. I have the right to know.
That humans have so many rights, does not make a silent painting wrong.
I don’t do it for the people and I don’t do it against the people.

I’m not moved, he said. It’s too static.
It’s so sad, I said. As if no-one ever entered here. As if no-one ever returned from there. As if it has never been used. As if all color has gone from the inside, has been drained. This is not the origin of the world. This [...]

I don’t want to see your source material, he said. It’s of no consequence to me when I look at your painting . It is no excuse and not part of the material evidence of the final work . You can’t judge a painting by the picture that inspired it.
It started with a [...]

It is very simple
Eros is about coming
And death
About going
somewhere

previously published in Marlene Dumas: Suspect, Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa, Venice, 2003 and Marlene Dumas, Phaidon, London, 2009, p. 148

Now that ‘obsession’ is the name of a perfume and
Freud don’t slip no more, we no longer have to make
Vincent too beautiful to be true.
Van Gogh was not Antoin Artaud.
Van Gogh was not the star in Lust for Life.
Van Gogh was not keen on insanity.

Prisoners are told that torture will stop if they talk. But the rule rather than the exception is that after they’ve talked, they are killed anyway.

Names distinguish you from others, serving different purposes in different fields. A name is an identifying device. You can’t get the papers you might need if you don’t have [...]

Thinking about – Blocks, Bars, Crosses, Crossing out and Crossing over….
The Politics of Geometry versus The Geography of Politics

Stella

I’ve always enjoyed making links to other artists.
This often shows through my titles, which to me is like a childlike play.
The likeneness between these works are often only cosmetic.

Serial killers

I am never going to make a series of heads again, or for that matter, a group of simi- lar yet different things placed next to or (too) close to one-another. It is effective – it’s not just drawing, it’s an installation. You are not just facing one image in front of you, but [...]

Now that it’s over, I want to start

It’s hard for me to work next to and with someone whose work I like.
Not that it’s not exciting. Although I work alone and with printed matter as my models, I’ve always been attracted to photographers who work among real people. But it doesn’t seem [...]

Once upon a time, there lived an enormous amount of painters and quite a lot of filmstars in all the big cities of the world. One day a painter met a moviestar and the painter thought, ‘I’d like to be a star, so beautiful, artificial and bright.’
And the star thought, ‘I’d like to [...]

If one can identify with ‘the pictures’ generation and with those who’ve
seen more reel love than real love
and one can appreciate Stage,
where the two shall never meet
because they were in different scenes and on separate screens, all along;
you realize that in the beginning was not [...]

Skeletons in the closet
To write about South African art and its politics (with the emphasis on politics)
I find very difficult. I distrust myself and all others involved with all our multi-motivational defences and references.

Every time I try, I shift my perspective and doubt my own sicerity. I want to say [...]

I never meant to stay
I suppose that’s what they all say.
It was my first time in a peepshow
so when the girl smiled at me
I said, ‘Only looking’, and she replied,
‘That’s how I got started here too.’

Art and Prostitution

If a Prostitute is a [...]

It has always saddened me that the art form that chose me as its mistress did not make people cry. Music does. Books do. And bad movies do it even better. But not paintings.

There are some good explanations for this. Paintings don’t move. They don’t have the same type of narrative structure or succession [...]

Can pin-ups still survive in a pornographic age? Somehow just like marriage and prisons they still do.

Origin

The pin-up is of American/English origin. As is the word ‘sexy’. It dates from somewhere around the beginning of the century. In Europe there were more pornographic pictures. These didn’t exist in America.

As a very [...]

Magdalena
or the Megamodel meets the Holy Whore

It’s not the fallen woman
nor the temptress I’m after.
It’s not the babydolls I want
nor the Amazons. It’s everything
mixed together to form
a true bastard race.

Painting is my oldest subject
Fashion is my newest
and [...]

The young child, the painter,
the foreigner are ‘not from here’,
they are often not part of the ruling
discourse, the preconceptions that
are common or fashionable at a
certain stage

I am not a New Yorker
I am not Dutch
I am no more living in South [...]

My fatherland is South Africa
my mothertongue is Afrikaans
my surname is French.
I don’t speak French.
My mother always wanted me to go to Paris.
She thought Art was French,
because of Picasso.
I thought Art was American,
because of Artforum.
I thought Mondrian was [...]

In this world there are only two tragedies: one is not getting what you want, the other is getting what you want (to paraphrase Oscar Wilde).

‘What is the work about? Is it about eroticism?’
‘No, it’s not tender enough’, he said.
‘Is it about cruelty? Is it that nasty?’ I asked.
[...]

I paint because I am a woman.
(It’s a logical necessity.)
If painting is female and insanity is a female malady, then all women painters are mad and all male painters are women.

I paint because I am an artificial blonde woman.
(Brunettes have no excuse.)
If all good painting is [...]

The muse is exhausted
because she smiles too much

The muse is exhausted
because she works overtime. There’s too many men and women that feed from her breasts.

I don’t want to sound like Michael Jackson saying “It don’t matter if you’re black or white”, because that is, like the issues concerning male and female, unfortunately still painfully burning bright! This is a sensitive area for almost everybody.
Yet it is not politically correctness that inspired these images, but the loss of [...]

At the beginning of the 90′s. or the end of the 20th century, it is evident that the workings of suggestive artworks need re-examination. It has become clear that all artworks that SUGGEST narrative put the viewer on trial.

A child is born on a certain day
but the birth of an artwork is impossible to calculate
and it’s origin is impossible to find.

The beginning (or the end) of a story is suggested
but no tales are told. Accidents happen.

The relationships between the artworks
show “missing links” which [...]

I am the third person
observing the bad marriage
between art and life
watching the pose and the slip
seeing the end in the beginning.

Die meisie met die spraakgebrek
says yes but means no.

Marlene Dumas
1990

previously published in Marlene Dumas, Sweet Nothings: notes and texts, [...]

My background

Colour
I don’t know much about colour really
I use it intuitively.

I don’t know much about racism really
my knowledge is skindeep.

What do you mean, he said.
Oh she said, didn’t you know
all scars have a pink that shows.

The Exotic versus the [...]

Dressed in Exposure

Time of the day – just before the night falls
Time of the year – always in the past
Identity – untitled
Sphere – autistic
Sex – female
Intentions – unclear Dress – informal to naked

I. The uncomfortable Audience

The impact of Lidwien van de [...]

Models wait
for artists to give them meaning.
Girls (use to) wait
for boys.
Patients wait
for doctors…

ART waits for no-one.
ART cares for no-one.
ART doesn’t speak unless
it’s spoken to.
ART is only metaphorically
a language, not literary.
ART does not [...]

Once upon a time there lived a boy called Erik Andriesse, who distinguished himself from the passionless people around him by glowing in the dark. Now the country he lived in was quite dark. Artists however would talk about the extraordinary light in that country.

During the 1980s all the artists were interested in the [...]

My people were all shot
by a camera, framed,
before I painted them. They didn’t know that I’d do this to them.
They didn’t know by what names I’d call them. They might even be
disgusted by words like evil, forgiveness, genes …
They weren’t payed. They weren’t directed.
[...]

Some people die of their own passion.

Some by the passion of others.
And some simply die of illness or another natural cause.
I am against it.

Art is not a mirror. Art is a translation of that which you do not know,
but of which you want to convince others or [...]