Collection 1950s–1970s

36 / 38

Marlene Dumas. Untitled. c. 1976 483

Ink on paper, 14 3/4 x 9 7/8" (37.5 x 25.1 cm). Purchased with funds provided by Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis and the Speyer Family Foundation in honor of Maja Oeri. © 2025 Marlene Dumas

Artist, Marlene Dumas: I came to Holland to study at the end of the ‘70s and this old work is a very good example of the first period of my stay. Because at that stage, I thought I was not going to paint again. I discovered these big rolls of paper. And so suddenly, I thought I didn’t need painting anymore. The drawing, the collage could carry everything I wanted to say.

In my first years, I just read a lot. I read all the books that was censored in South Africa, or that you couldn’t get at all. And I started to make relationships between the different things that happened in the different countries.

I once said I use second hand images and first hand emotions. What I meant was the pictures that I use have already often been shot by someone else.

As a child, I liked images, and the images that were most available to me were pictures from magazines, and so I always used to love to cut out pictures, especially of film stars.

And when I was at art school in South Africa, at the Film Society, we saw films of Godard, Bergman, Fassbinder, and I was fascinated by how they use narrative and also the medium of film itself. I wanted drawing to relate more to the life around me, but not only in a sort of realistic, figurative way. I wanted it to be more like these films that I admired.

My work is so unsystematic and so broad, but it's all about people things. A lot of the photographs that I collected were indeed about the human face, but also about poses, you know, the way people use their bodies to attract another body.