Palazzo Grassi, unpublished works at the personal exhibition of Marlene Dumas in Venice
“Open-end” is the title of Marlene Dumas’ solo exhibition held at Palazzo Grassi, opening to the public on Sunday 27 March 2022
The personal exhibition of Marlene Dumas (27 March 2022 – 08 January 2023), the contemporary artist born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1953 and considered one of the most significant authoritative artists in the contemporary art scene.
The exhibition at Palazzo Grassi enters the program of monographs dedicated to great contemporary artists started in 2012 and promoted by Pinault collection.
The 100 works – with a selection of paintings and drawings made since 1984 – are exhibited in the exhibition entitled “open-end” and curated by Caroline Bourgeois in collaboration with Marlene Dumas. Many works are unpublished and from the Pinault Collection, from international museums and private collections.
Marlene Dumas grew up in South Africa and studied fine arts during the brutal apartheid regime. In 1976 she reaches Europe to continue her studies and she goes to Amsterdam, where she joins her permanently. The first years of her career she devoted herself to collage and text works, later she preferred the technique of oil on canvas and ink on paper. She works and inherent portraits of despair, fears and let the viewer in deep reflection.
The use of the images from which she draws inspiration are Polaroid images taken by her but also others from newspapers, magazines and film stills. She declares about her work: “I am an artist who uses second hand images and first order experiences”The themes she deals with range from love to death, violence or tenderness and, nevertheless, gender and racial questions, all within news events or the history of art. For Marlene Dumas, painting is a very physical act, which has to do with eroticism and her different stories.
Marlene Dumas’s work draws the different paradoxes of the most intense emotions from human figures: “Painting is the trace of the human touch, it is the skin of a surface. A painting is not a postcard. “
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog published in co-edition by Palazzo Grassi – Punta della Dogana in collaboration with Marsilio Editori, Venice.