LOS ANGELES.- This exhibition is the first North American mid-career survey of paintings and drawings by South African artist Marlene Dumas. Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave is organized by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in association with The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition is curated by Connie Butler, the MOCA Ahmanson Curatorial Fellow and The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at MoMA. MOCA’s presentation of the exhibition is organized by MOCA Assistant Curator Rebecca Morse. Following its initial presentation at MOCA from June 22 through September 22, 2008, the exhibition travels to MoMA where it will be on view from December 14, 2008 through February 16, 2009. The exhibition will then travel to The Menil Collection, Houston, where it will be on view from March 26 through June 21, 2009.

Born in 1953 in Cape Town, South Africa, Dumas studied art at the Michaelis School of Fine Arts at the University of Cape Town and moved to Amsterdam in 1976 to pursue further studies at de Ateliers. Dumas has lived and worked in Amsterdam ever since. The exhibition surveys more than 30 years of work and is organized around the theme of portraiture. Drawing almost exclusively on photographic source material, Dumas explores crucial questions of humanity and representation. Subjects of life, birth, sex, death, grief, and identity are represented through portraits and images drawn from her ongoing archive of Polaroid photographs, personal snapshots, and thousands of media images culled over time. A painting is never a literal rendition of a photographic source, nor is the material source of a painting the same as its psychological subject matter. Rather Dumas focuses on the inherent differences between photography and painting—what she has described as “the essential immorality or indifference” of a photographic image when it is removed from its original context or stripped of its identifying information.

“Marlene Dumas’s oeuvre explores important themes of humanity and identity that cross race, gender, and cultural lines and are as relevant today as they were when she began making work in Cape Town, South Africa, in the mid-1970s,” comments MOCA Director Jeremy Strick. “MOCA is honored to present this remarkable exhibition with our colleagues at MoMA. Our partnerships with fellow institutions enable us to continue to bring the work of the world’s most talented and groundbreaking contemporary artists to the United States,”

Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave features approximately 70 paintings and 35 drawings ranging in format from small individual drawings and intimate, early sketchbooks, to large-scale ink washes, which are, in some cases, more monumental than the paintings. Several series of drawings are also featured, including Models, which consists of more than 100 single sheets. Dumas’s paintings are also diverse in size and scale—ranging from very large, recumbent figures of the dead or newborn, to her newest painting, an intimate portrait of the Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe. The exhibition takes its subtitle, “Measuring Your Own Grave,” from a painting made in 2003. In this work, a figure bows toward the viewer, gracefully stretching its arms the width of the canvas. For the artist, this measuring is akin to the process of representation itself. Dumas believes that the process of making art is a struggle to be free of the prescriptions of the culture one comes from, just as the figures in her paintings measure themselves against the edges of the frame.

“The ambiguity often found in Dumas’s portraits allows the audience to deduce their own meaning from each work, and the comprehensiveness of this exhibition provides the opportunity for the viewer to trace her themes over time,” comments MOCA Assistant Curator Rebecca Morse. “The ambiguity of representation in her paintings and drawings is ultimately a political act, enticing the viewer into an awareness of his or her role in the assignation of meaning to faces, bodies, groups, and figures.”

Installed thematically and with a focus on Dumas’s ongoing investigation of portraiture, the exhibition reflects the artist’s tendency to work in series, with groups of paintings arranged together to create new associations. Key paintings in the exhibition include The White Disease (1985), which addresses issues of race by
creating a visual relationship between the surface of skin and the surface of painting. In addition to works with single figures, Dumas also produces large-scale group portraits such as The Teacher (sub a) (1987).

Dumas’s portrayal of the female figure, often nude or provocatively clothed, contrasts with the art historical representation of women. In iconic works such as Waiting (For Meaning) and Losing (Her Meaning) (both 1988), the artist questions the power of this classic image—the female nude—to convey meaning. Other works, such as Miss Pompadour (1999) and Cracking the Whip (2000), show women in provocative poses, both humorous and assaulting in their acrobatic sexuality, while Male Beauty (2002) features an erotic image of a male nude. Connected to her exploration of female identity, Dumas’s work often includes portraits of infants and children, focusing on pregnancy and motherhood and the physical and psychological trauma and mystery of both. Works like Die Baba (1985) challenge the traditional portrayal of children as cute and innocent by suggesting their mysterious and even threatening aspects. Notions of beauty and ugliness underlie Models (1994), a group of 100 related drawings in serial format.

Examples from Dumas’s most recent body of work, the Man Kind series, highlight the artist’s ongoing commitment to questioning received ideas about identity and politics by presenting portraits of men, seemingly of Middle Eastern descent, drawn from images of terrorists, martyrs, Dutch Moroccans, Palestinians, friends, actors, and ordinary citizens. In Duct Tape (2002–05), the subject’s face is obscured by a hood, recalling recent photographs of Abu Ghraib or images of Palestinian prisoners. These paintings force a recognition by the viewer of the complexity of current political conflicts and our evolving understanding of race, identity, and human confrontation.

As curator Connie Butler writes in the accompanying catalogue, “Dumas’s career long investigation of the portrait cannot be understood outside her relationship to issues of identity… Dumas has said that South Africa gave her content and Europe gave her form and, indeed, her relationship to her subjects is deeply imprinted by her experiences of constituency, citizenship, and viewership, as well as how these subjectivities shift as we inhabit different cultural positions.”

Marlene Dumas has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions, at institutions that include the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C; the Tate Gallery, London; and the Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt. The artist had recent survey exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town; and The Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg.