Curator, Connie Butler: Hello, I'm Connie Butler, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at The Museum of Modern Art, and I'm pleased to welcome you to Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave.
Marlene Dumas is a South African artist who has lived and worked in Amsterdam since 1978. This survey exhibition of her paintings and drawings spans the last four decades—a time of turmoil in the world, and occasionally in her own life, which she has responded to with works of acute observation and searing emotional impact.
Both the exhibition and to a large extent, the artist’s own body of work, is conceived around the subject of the portrait and portraiture, pictures of the living, pictures of the dead, of birth and of sexuality.
Dumas often starts with what she calls “second-hand images” – photographs clipped from newspapers and magazines, mostly of people.
Artist Marlene Dumas:
Artist, Marlene Dumas: I once made a statement that I 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.
Connie Butler: These images may remain for months, even years, in her ever-growing collection which she refers to as an image bank. But when she chooses one for a new work, she transforms her photographic source material into highly personal painted images that speak to universal truths about who we are and the forces that shape us.
Your guide on this audio program will be the artist herself, who will share insights into her working methods and the extraordinary art she has created as a witness to her time—including the singular work that prompted the title of the exhibition.
Dumas is also a poet, and on this tour, you can hear her reading several poems that inspired or were inspired by her works of art.