Artist, Marlene Dumas: Most of my paintings are of single individuals. But at a certain stage I thought I would move from the individual to the group.
By chance, I found a photograph in an old book called The Turkish Schoolgirls.
I have to admit I didn’t know that much about Europe when I came from South Africa, the things going on between different groups of people, Germany and the Turkish population or Holland with the Moroccan population. So in my first years I didn’t paint. I just read a lot. I read all the books that were 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. I want the viewer to feel that they stand in an intimate relationship with the subjects, that they are actually looking straight at you.
On the formal level the group almost became this one overall field. They’re not really painted as separate individuals. That makes a certain type of unity.
But you also have to think of what happened: How the individual figure becomes a group figure?