Marlene Dumas grew up in South Africa in the 1950s and ’60s and recalls her love of going to drive-in movies. “Yet I never wanted a camera,” she writes in the catalog of her latest exhibition, at Tate Modern here through May 10. “I loved to play and draw in the sand. I loved the illustrations of fairy tales, and the stories of the Bible and American cartoons that were around. I drew bikini girls on the back of cigarette packets to impress my parents’ friends.”
A procession of bikini girls, “Miss World,” is one of the first works on display in “Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden” at the Tate. With more than 100 of her works, the show is her most extensive European retrospective to date, curated by Kerryn Greenberg and Helen Sainsbury. The exhibition travels on to the Fondation Beyeler in Switzerland at the end of May.
The artist was 10 years old when she drew “Miss World” in crayons, revealing precocious artistic talent and an acute and quirky eye. That picture was imaginatively created from various images of the event she had seen. It was only in the mid-1980s that she would begin to use specific photographic sources or images drawn from movies as starting points — though in the final work sometimes little or nothing of the initial material remains.