The Dumas Report

Two more women writing positively on the work of Marlene Dumas, both for the September 2005 issue of Artforum -

Svetlana Alpers on The Triumph of Painting -

"Marlene Dumas also uses photos. But she is not depressed about painting. In her hands, photos are a mode of access. A way to connect with the world much as earlier painters had used the resource of paintings past. Working her medium is what matters in facing a bleak and brutal world. It is by means of the supple laying on of pale, washlike pigments that Dumas gives value to an extended strip of naked youths (Young Boys, 1993), even as she is mercilessly exposing their vulnerable bodies."

Elisabeth Sussman on the 51st Venice Biennale -

"Installed close by Bacon and Guston, Marlene Dumas’s magnificent group of paintings, many of them depicting figures lying dead or wounded, instantly recalled Gerhard Richter’s Baader-Meinhof series of 1988; but Dumas’s figures, with their white flesh and mouths and nostrils filled with dried blood, luminescent against dark backgrounds, are bravura passages of loose and spontaneous brushwork all her own."

ANTI-DUMAS:

Charlie Finch, Tyler Green, Richard Polsky, Jerry Saltz

PRO-DUMAS:

Nicole Davis, Nicole Eisenmann (and in the comments to this previous post), Joy Garnett, Cynthia King, Sarah Milroy, Adrian Searle, Richard Vine, Carol Vogel, Elisabeth Sussman, Svetlana Alpers