Marlene Dumas: Selected Works
Zwirner & Wirth is pleased to present a selection of paintings and works on paper by Marlene Dumas. The works in this exhibition, many of which have never been exhibited in New York, will span the last two decades of Dumas's artistic production, giving view to a range of thematic and formal concerns.
Dumas's formal mastery belies the complexity of her conceptual preoccupations and she is thus widely considered to be one of today's most important living figurative painters. Born and educated in South Africa, Dumas went to the Netherlands in the late 1970s, where she studied painting and psychology and where she continues to live and work. With its art historical and pop cultural references (which are sometimes combined), Dumas's practice is often based upon the painterly manipulation of found imagery. Many of the works in this exhibition exemplify her interest in how image-making is implicitly involved in the cultural processes of objectification, while simultaneously expressing the artist’s desire to pry the act of figurative painting loose from that history.