Marlene Dumas: Myths & Mortals

Publisher: David Zwirner Books

Publication Date: 2019

Texts by Marlene Dumas and Claire Messud

Marlene Dumas’s works respond more than ever to the uncertainty and sensuality of the painting process itself. Allowing the structure of the canvases and the materiality of the paint greater freedom to inform the development of her compositions, the artist has likened the creation of these works to the act of falling in love: an unpredictable and open-ended process that is as filled with awkwardness and anxiety as it is with bliss and discovery.

Myths & Mortals documents a selection of paintings—debuted in the spring of 2018 at David Zwirner, New York—ranging from monumental nude figures to intimately scaled canvases that present details of bodily parts and facial features. Several nearly ten-foot-tall paintings focus on individual figures, including a number of male and female nudes and a seemingly solemn bride, whose expression is obscured behind a floor-length veil. Like the Greek gods and goddesses, the figures in these paintings are at once larger than life and overwhelmingly human. The smaller-scale paintings—referred to by the artist as “erotic landscapes”—present a variety of fragmentary images: eyes, lips, nipples, or lovers locked in a kiss. Evident across all of these works is the artist’s uniquely sensitive treatment of the human form and her constantly evolving experimentation with color and texture.

Alongside these paintings, Dumas presents an expansive series of thirty-two works on paper originally created for a Dutch translation of William Shakespeare’s narrative poem Venus & Adonis (1593) by Hafid Bouazza (2016). Myths & Mortals is accompanied by new scholarship on the artist by Claire Messud and a text by Dumas herself.

Details

Publisher: David Zwirner Books

Artist: Marlene Dumas

Contributors: Claire Messud

Publication Date: 2019

ISBN: 9781941701997

Retail: $75 | £60

Status: Available

Designer: Filiep Tacq

Printer: VeronaLibri, Verona

Binding: Hardcover

Dimensions: 7 ¼ × 11 in | 18.4 × 27.9 cm

Pages: 128

Reproductions: 82 color

Artist and Contributors

Marlene Dumas

Marlene Dumas (b. 1953) is regarded as one of the most influential painters working today. Her paintings and drawings, often devoted to depictions of the human form, are typically culled from the artist’s vast archive of images, including art historical materials, mass media sources, and personal snapshots of friends and family. Gestural, fluid, and frequently spectral, Dumas’s works reframe and re-contextualize her subjects, exploring the boundaries between public and private selves.

Claire Messud

Claire Messud is an award-winning American novelist. The author of six works of fiction, including The Emperor’s Children (2006), The Woman Upstairs (2013), and The Burning Girl (2017), Messud has received Guggenheim and Radcliffe fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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