Curator, Connie Butler: Like many of Dumas’s works, these two Magdalenas spring from multiple inspirations. Tall, narrow and dark, the paintings loom majestically over the viewer, like monumental models on the catwalk.
Artist, Marlene Dumas: I started with the notion of wanting to work with dark and light.
With the lighter one, it is painted in a very flat way. I mean, it is a bit simplistic, but I wondered if I could make something that is both a woman, but is also almost an abstract painting.
The darker Magdalena, she is a bit more three dimensional. And you see while I struggle with the typical ways of looking at black and white, and at woman and all those notions, I also struggle with what type of painting do I actually want? Do I want more illusionism or less illusionism? And in these two paintings I really struggled.
And also my titles become a metaphor for the process of painting itself. I had all these different types of women. So Mary Magdalene, she was also for me a very interesting character because on the one hand there is the sexuality of the Magdalena and on the other hand, she you know, she read books and wanted to be wise.
So I just called them all Magdalena. And then later I was a bit sorry, because now I can’t identify the differences. So I gave them nicknames again.
Connie Butler: One nickname, Newman’s Zip, refers to paintings by the American Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman, who reduced his canvases to flat areas of color punctuated by vertical bands he called zips. The other nickname, Manet’s Queen, refers to Edouard Manet’s 19th century canvas Olympia, in which a white courtesan is attended by a black maid.