Exceptional Works: Marlene Dumas

David Zwirner is pleased to participate in Art Basel Qatar’s inaugural edition with a presentation of three paintings by Marlene Dumas. Dumas (b. 1953) is widely regarded as one of the most influential painters working today. Her paintings and drawings, frequently devoted to depictions of the human form, typically reference a vast archive of source imagery collected by the artist, including art historical materials, mass media images, and personal snapshots of friends and family. Gestural, fluid, and frequently spectral, Dumas’s works reframe and recontextualize her subjects, exploring the ambiguous and shifting boundaries between public and private selves. 
 
Figure in a Landscape, Living on Your Knees, and Olive Tree (all 2010) belong to Dumas’s Against the Wall series (2009–2010). Dumas first presented Against the Wall in a 2010 solo exhibition at David Zwirner New York, a version of which traveled to the Serralves Museum in Porto, Portugal. 
 
Works from the Against the Wall series are held in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; The Broad, Los Angeles, and the Dallas Museum of Art, among other important collections.

Figure in a Landscape (2010) is based on an image published in a Dutch newspaper showing two women and two young girls walking past a security wall erected to separate Palestinian and Israeli territories. In her composition, Dumas has chosen to depict a single child, who appears diminutive against the barrier.

Dumas’s representations acknowledge universal themes of instability and isolation. The titles of these works not only describe the motifs depicted but also refer to the artist’s struggle with the boundaries of her chosen medium. 

The works in this series derive primarily from media imagery and newspaper clippings documenting Israel and Palestine that Dumas sourced around this time.

As Dumas wrote in a 2010 letter to David Zwirner, which is included in the Against the Wall exhibition catalogue, “Which painting started the others? It is the one called The Wall. I saw this rather tranquil image in a Dutch newspaper and at first glance I assumed it was the Wailing Wall. Until I read the caption.”

Living on your Knees (2010) is inspired by a newspaper showing a Palestinian man praying by the ruins of his home. Whereas the wreckage is visible in the original source image, here the background and context are more ambiguous; yet Dumas conveys the sense of tragedy and mourning through the earnestness of her depiction of the figure.

In a 2008 New York Times article, Dumas told Deborah Solomon, “I still want to try before I die to do a tree.”

For the 2010 David Zwirner exhibition Dumas painted Olive Tree (2010), featuring a brushy and gestural olive tree—frequently regarded as a symbol of peace and prosperity. At first sight, the scene appears serene, with several other loosely rendered trees placed at regular intervals in the distance, as in a grove. Faintly visible in the background, however, is the security wall erected to separate Palestinian and Israeli territories. Dumas’s inspiration for the painting was derived from an oft-cited line by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: “If the olive trees knew the hands that planted them / Their oil would become tears.”

While the paintings in this series comprise a critique of the wall separating the West Bank from Israel, they ultimately lament the failure of co-existence. Dumas explores how image making is implicitly involved not only in the cultural processes of objectification but also in the way in which events are documented and collectively understood. As museum director João Fernandes has observed, Against the Wall explores “the condition of the human being confronted with an adverse world.”