MARLENE DUMAS made history in 2005 when a Christie’s auction result made her the most expensive female artist alive. In spring 2018, Dumas made a rare appearance in New York City with “Marlene Dumas: Myths & Mortals” at David Zwirner gallery. Her first solo presentation in the city since 2010, the show featured works inspired by Hafid Bouazza’s Dutch translation of “Venus and Adonis” (1593), a poem by William Shakespeare, through which she distilled the signature eroticism of a career known for the intimacy and quiet power of its photo-based portraiture. Dumas lives and works in Amsterdam but was born in South Africa, and her paintings and figures are often perceived through the lens of that country’s history. Seldom discussed, however, are her public artworks and, similarly, the social element of her process, which is widely seen as solitary, the product of a figurative studio practice with no live models, and with found imagery as its only source materials. It is perhaps for this reason that when Hans Ulrich Obrist and Virgil Abloh – both multi-hyphenate culture makers with artistic directorships, Obrist at London’s Serpentine Galleries and Abloh at Louis Vuitton menswear – sat down with Dumas for 032c Issue #35, it was the artist’s public works, and their relationship to their audience, subjects, and environment, that compelled the conversation.
VIRGIL ABLOH: I saw your series of portraits Great Men [exhibited in “The Absent Museum” group show in 2017] at Wiels in Brussels. It’s beautiful.
MARLENE DUMAS: You were there? You see more than I do! I didn’t go myself.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: When did you do these portraits? Were they done especially for that show?
No, I started this work for Manifesta 10 [2014] in Saint Petersburg, but because of Russia’s homophobic laws, there was a whole thing: should you participate, or shouldn’t you?
VA: Yes, you want to make sure that it’s a safe haven for your ideas and your talent.
But then I had the idea to celebrate men I like. A lot of the men that I really admire happen to be gay. I’m a big fan of Jean Genet, of Pasolini, of Tennessee Williams.
HUO: James Baldwin.
And James Baldwin. So then I had to find the right format, and I thought, “I don’t have to think of a totally new form, or make something I’ve never seen before.” I started to do these portraits: intimate-sized ink drawings of gay men. I didn’t go [to Russia], but I sent the works! So that is special.
HUO: And it’s an ongoing series?
Yes. The work is traveling. The Russian show only had, I think, about 16 men. And now the group has started to get bigger and bigger.
HUO: Who was the first one you did?
At the start of the Great Men series, I thought, “The Russians have their own famous guys, but I want to show them that it’s not just ballet dancers and pianists who are gay heroes.” I had my scientists, like Alan Turing and others, but I also looked for Russians. I had guys like Leonard Matlovich, the American who fought in Vietnam and was discharged for being gay, and whose gravestone said, “When I was in the military they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one.”
VA: That’s deep!