Who is Marlene Dumas?
She was born in 1953 in Cape Town and has lived in the Netherlands since the late 1970s.
Her work often focuses on the human figure and explores intense themes such as: Love, sex, and death
Race and identity
Violence and guilt
Politics and vulnerability
Dumas is known for using photographs – personal and journalistic – as references, which she transforms through expressive brushwork into deeply psychological portraits.
Her style blurs the boundaries between intimacy and detachment, creating haunting and evocative imagery. The Painter (1994) Perhaps her most iconic work.
Depicts her young daughter nude, covered in paint, staring directly at the viewer.
Themes: innocence, creativity, perception of the artist, and female identity. Magdalena (1995) A provocative depiction of Mary Magdalene.
Interrogates religious iconography and sexuality. Dead Marilyn (2008) A portrait of Marilyn Monroe based on the morgue photo taken after her death.
Reflects on celebrity, mortality, and media exploitation. Osama (2010) A controversial painting of Osama bin Laden based on a widely circulated image.
Challenges viewers to confront how media and politics shape villainy. Lucy (2004) One of many works named after or inspired by real women.
Emphasizes the expressive quality of watercolor and fluid linework. The Image as Burden (1993) A smaller but symbolically heavy painting that inspired the title of a major retrospective.
Portrays a man carrying a limp woman, echoing themes of martyrdom, violence, and love.
Miss January (1997)
This artwork recently garnered significant attention when it sold for $13.6 million (R246 million) at Christie's in New York on 14 May 14 setting a new auction record for a living female artist.
'Miss January' is a towering oil-on-canvas piece measuring approximately 9 feet tall (281.9cm x 101.6cm).
It portrays a blonde woman standing confidently, nude from the waist down, wearing only a single pink sock.
The subject's direct gaze and assertive posture challenge traditional representations of the female nude, confronting viewers with themes of vulnerability, power, and the objectification of women.
Painted in 1997, the work revisits Dumas's earlier explorations of femininity and identity, echoing her first known drawing, 'Miss World,' created when she was just 10 years old.
Through expressive brushwork and a limited color palette, Dumas blurs the lines between intimacy and detachment, inviting contemplation on the complexities of representation and perception.
The sale of 'Miss January' not only established a new benchmark for Dumas's market value but also underscored her influence in contemporary art.
The painting was previously part of the esteemed Rubell Family Collection, known for its commitment to contemporary artists.
Marlene Dumas is considered one of the most important painters of her generation.
Her work is part of major collections, including: The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York
The Tate Modern, London
The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Let us know by leaving a comment below, or send a WhatsApp to 060 011 021 1
Subscribe to The South African website's newsletters and follow us on WhatsApp, Facebook, X and Bluesky for the latest news.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
TimesLIVE
11 minutes ago
- TimesLIVE
‘Becoming a Sdudla': Fitness coach Kopano Mokhele gains 30kg to walk in his clients' shoes
In a radical and deeply personal fitness experiment online coach and content creator Kopano Mokhele has been deliberately gaining 30kg with plans to lose it all by November in a bold attempt to better understand, connect with and ultimately serve his clients. The Johannesburg-based trainer, known for his digital fitness community, says he was inspired by a documentary he watched years ago featuring coaches who intentionally gained weight to empathise with their clients' struggles. One such show is Fit to Fat to Fit, which follows trainers who abandon their healthy lifestyles to join their clients in the trenches of weight loss. 'Even though it's not an original idea, the first time I saw a trainer deliberately gain weight was from a documentary, maybe 10 or 15 years ago. I'm just the first person to do it in this day and time in Africa. I knew this was going to help me grow as a coach, so that I can become more impactful to my clients,' said Mokhele. Mokhele said the idea was born from frustration over clients hitting a wall in their fitness journeys which, in fitness terms, is called a plateau where progress stalls and motivation fades. 'I always get to a point when coaching a handful of my clients where we hit a plateau. I know they can break it because it's all mental, but maybe there's a language or influence barrier. So I stopped talking to them or through them and decided to talk from them by embarking on this journey,' he said. Mokhele has amassed more than 116.4K followers and 1.3-million likes on TikTok.
IOL News
11 minutes ago
- IOL News
Pride portraits
Life partners, Carol Lennon, left, and Sharon Cox are two of the people photographer Tamara Wilson captured as part of her series, Pride Portraits. The Cape Town-based photographer undertook the project as a 'celebration of all identities within religious contexts'. Image: Tamara Wilson Pride Portraits is a series by Cape Town photographer Tamara Wilson that explores the intersection of queerness and religion. Through intimate portraits, the project highlights how queer individuals express their spirituality despite often facing exclusion within religious spaces. Wilson's work aims to challenge conventional norms and amplify voices that are frequently marginalised in faith communities. The series seeks to promote a broader cultural shift towards acceptance and inclusion of all identities within religion. Thuli Mbete Thuli Mbete Image: Tamara Wilson Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Next Stay Close ✕ 'Being a Gobela [a person who trains sangoma initiates] calls on one to raise, nurture and cultivate those entrusted to me by their ancestors. I am blessed to have a home that is glittered with those who are part of my [LQBTIQA+] community, and support from my own mother who has been my pillar of strength along this journey. May these portraits of me remind the audience that family is not limited to biological kin, but your chosen family will always find you.' Sharon Cox and Carol Lennon Sharon Cox and Carol Lennon Image: Tamara Wilson Sharon (right): 'Like the majority of people in this country, I grew up in religion. It was always a part of my life; a part that I valued deeply. I eventually would turn my back on organised religion, after becoming a critical thinker – as opposed to a passive consumer of religion. I could not sit and listen to all the things and people that God supposedly condemns. This included, but was not limited to, how apartheid was justified, how patriarchy…played out in very real and concrete ways – and how I was somehow the spawn of the devil. 'Later, I would find a denomination with a social justice focus, which was also affirming of who I was and who everyone else was. I then became actively involved in this ministry and eventually went on to study theology. I never sought ordination to become a preaching pastor. It was, and still is, my belief that how I live in the world and what I do daily is my ministry. This has served me well, for example, in terms of training stakeholders, the majority of whom are people of faith – a faith viewed through a patriarchal lens, so they very often hold narrow and conservative views.'I feel that I would miss the point completely if I do this work [sensitisation of State officials] and leave faith out of it, as it is the key driver of discrimination, prejudice and being able to access affirming services as LGBTIQ+ persons. It's not always easy, but it is necessary.'Carol:'I do not follow hate, i.e. organised religion. Humanism is my nature.' Vusikhaya Khumalo Vusikhaya Khumalo Image: Tamara Wilson 'These pride portraits are a reminder of the beauty that I possess as a black trans man. My journey in traditional healing affirmed that diversity in gender expression and sexuality has always been a part of our culture, criminalised during a traumatic period of colonisation. I would like my images to be a reminder that, in a world that has weaponised our existence, be you, be proud.' Tara Weinberg Tara Weinberg Image: Tamara Wilson 'I am a queer South African jew, drag king and member of South African Jews for a Free Palestine [SAJFP]. I come from a family of anti-Zionist Jews. 'I believe that Palestine, like South Africa, is subject to a legacy and ongoing process of settler colonialism, accompanied by the accumulation of property, including land, by white settlers. In both South Africa and Palestine, people have waged struggles against the structural inequalities wrought by settler colonialism. And in both places, queer people continue to insist that there is no liberation for some, without liberation for all. 'In spite of the clear opposition by many Jews, including queer Jews, to the state of Israel and its actions, Zionism has attempted to invalidate any Jews who are against it. The refrain that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism implies that Zionism and Judaism are one and the same. Zionists attempt to discredit SAJFP members and other Jewish anti-Zionists by saying they are not 'real Jews'. They use a similar tactic against queer people who stand in solidarity with Palestine, claiming that the existence of queerphobia in Palestine makes queer support incompatible. This ignores the fact that queerphobia exists in every society, as every queer person can attest. It also seeks to erase the existence of queer Palestinians. 'I stand in solidarity with Palestinians fighting for their very survival, however they identify. I also stand in solidarity with those fighting for their lives in Sudan and the Congo, including our queer comrades there. There is no pride in genocide.' The late Muhsin Hendricks Muhsin Hendricks Image: Tamara Wilson
Daily Maverick
2 hours ago
- Daily Maverick
Breakfast With Mugabe — laying a ghost to rest, awakening a monster
At a time when authoritarians are having a global moment, Calvin Ratladi, 2025's Standard Bank Young Artist for Theatre, directs a slow-burn psychological thriller about a liberation hero with a deeply contested legacy. The stage is a divided realm, its representation of Harare State House, circa 2001, visually emerging from the raw earth, bursting up through the rubble and detritus of an African wasteland. The presidential living room, where most of the play's intrigue unfolds, is surrounded by a landscape that's been literally and metaphorically pillaged. First the colonisers came, and then something else: each, in turn, have infiltrated the earth, dug into it, taken from it, poisoned it, left bodies and other secrets buried beneath it. It's in the privileged setting of Robert Mugabe's domestic quarters that we first meet his wife, the malicious and manipulative 'First Shopper', played by Gontse Ntshegang as a woman you don't want to mess with. Slippery, full of machinations, used to getting her way, she struts around the furniture, bending the ear of a white psychiatrist and tobacco farm owner named Peric (Craig Jackson), who has been summoned and is waiting to conduct his initial consultation with the Zimbabwean leader. Grace Mugabe's initial niceties – offering Peric a beverage as she talks him through the president's disturbing visitations by an ngozi, the malevolent spirit of a fallen comrade – unsubtly hints at her own ever-burgeoning self-interest. Along with expensive taste in clothes, she has an instinct for survival and every chance she gets unabashedly tries to persuade the doctor to see her point of view – she needs her husband cured of whatever affliction ails him. Peric, who has treated other Zimbabweans afflicted by unwelcome spirits, is reverential, respectful, polite. Whether or not he recognises his hostess for the viper she is, is unclear. When Mugabe finally enters, you're left with little doubt that this is both a man assailed by some unnatural force – and a tyrant to be feared. 'I have been informed that I will not live forever,' he tells Peric. It's a joke delivered deadpan, but it's also possible to detect in Themba Ndaba, who plays the titular despot, a menacingly unironic desire to rule forever. Also on stage is Zimbabwean-born Farai Chigudu as the bodyguard/secret policeman, Gabriel, who like some well-attired bouncer seems to be forever lurking on stage. His role? Well, he's a bit like 'Chekhov's gun' – if you introduce a musclebound thug in the first scene, there should be thuggish violence somewhere down the line. The production is Breakfast With Mugabe, first directed for the Royal Shakespeare Company by Sir Antony Sher in 2005. It's now playing at the Market Theatre after a brief debut at Makhanda's National Arts Festival. Directed by Calvin Ratladi, this year's Standard Bank Young Artist for Theatre, it was penned by the Cambridge-based playwright Fraser Grace, who came across a 2001 newspaper report about the Zimbabwean president receiving treatment from a white psychiatrist. While reports suggested he was being treated for depression, the play imagines that Mugabe was in fact battling a malevolent spirit. The playwright, after watching a performance of Ratladi's production, wrote in the UK's Guardian newspaper that he'd been interested in what might have been at the root of Mugabe's transition from revolutionary hero to dictatorial monster. The play is wordy, dense and fraught with the strangest sort of tension. And, despite the title, breakfast never comes. Cue, instead, a succession of lengthy conversations unpacking not only what might have led to this supernatural stalking, but an unravelling of history with some of the unwritten bits coloured in. While it leaves little doubt as to the rot of paranoia and corruption that's infected Mugabe's regime, it's also a reminder of the colonial context from which that regime emerged. Rather than a one-sided condemnation, the dialogue also digs into Mugabe's bitter memories – such as being refused permission by Ian Smith, in the course of his 11-year imprisonment, to bury his young son. Ratladi, who is 34, was born in Limpopo and grew up in Witbank, the son of a miner, says that 'over the years, as I have been finding myself as an artist, what seems to recur in my work and which I found them paralleled in the play are issues of land, and issues of memory and power'. Those issues are deeply mired in the dialogue, but they are also conveyed in the design. For one thing, Ratladi's own past is right there on the stage, represented by the shattered landscape. 'I grew up in the mines,' he says, 'so what you see is the landscape of my childhood.' Indeed, the representation of the land, this violated earth, in Ratladi's rendition of the play is of something forlorn, quite sombre. Never mind the various people and factions involved, it is the silent earth that has been witness to everything we have done to it in its name: acquiring it, fighting over it, digging it up, drilling into it, taking from it, burying our secrets and the bodies of the dead in it. 'The ground also has its own vibrations,' Ratladi says. 'But there's also violence that's being done on this thing called land. For me, it's a kind of penetration, a violation. And the question arises: how deep into the earth does the system in fact go?' Ratladi says he was drawn to the play by themes close to his heart, fascinated with the idea that 'what this figure of Robert Mugabe was actually grappling with might in fact have been a spiritual issue'. He also wanted to reveal the human side of its characters who are larger-than-life historic figures. He says he had wanted – as a director – to be able to enter into a dialogue with the work and with its author. 'Deciding on this play was a matter of discovering what sits in the body as important knowledge and figuring out how to work collaboratively with someone else's writing – to have a conversation with the work and also include the interests and embodied experiences of the performers.' The play does not pander, nor does it give any easy answers. 'I'm trying to open a conversation,' Ratladi says. 'As much as we can discuss Mugabe's passionate rhetoric about the land and his insistence on taking things back, this is the same man who earned seven degrees while in prison, and who embraced Western ways of thinking. And there's the fact that he sought medical help in Europe, rather than in the people around him.' And so questions as to Mugabe's true beliefs – and his motivations – remain. 'When I look into the story, I think there was a spiritual awakening, perhaps a calling, that wasn't fully embraced,' says Ratladi. 'And it caused a lot of suffering.' Like several Shakespearean antiheroes, most notably Macbeth, evidence of Mugabe's autocratic self-delusion is everywhere in this play. He possesses an ability to terrify that he wields with frightening calm. When he initially meets Peric, his first test is to demand that the psychiatrist puts on a different necktie, an act of supplication for which the white doctor has a lengthy, feasible excuse. Peric's apparent bolshiness – psychiatric professionalism tinged by thinly disguised colonial patronage – is something Mugabe seems to let slide. First it's the refusal of a necktie that would render him a member of Mugabe's staff, and then it's the manner in which Peric lays down the ground rules for the therapy sessions as though he were talking to just another patient. What's perhaps most frustrating about Peric is his blind refusal to recognise just how dangerous the man he's treating is. At various points, you might suspect it's naiveté, perhaps pompousness. Through a certain lens, it's evidence of deeply rooted colonialism, an assumption of some unstated privilege so engrained he's not even aware it exists. Peric, despite his relative position on the social rung, refuses to bend to Mugabe's small tests, and it's no accident that Grace Mugabe tells him that he and her husband are 'so much alike'. The two men lock horns in a weirdly convivial manner. Theirs is an unspoken conflict that drives the play's underlying tension, unease and menace, a feeling that anything can – and is likely to – happen. Whatever its cause, the audience senses the friction and feels the under-the-surface power struggle implicitly. 'When I direct, I always tell my actors that if someone deaf were to watch, they'd still follow the story,' Ratladi says. 'So, if you were to watch my show with earplugs, you would still 'hear' the production. If you are blind, you would still follow. That's how I approach the work: with a desire to cater for more 'other' audiences.' This idea of widening the audience is a metaphor, too, for Ratladi's belief that 'the South African conversation needs to be far more inclusive, to welcome to the table a wider range of people'. 'Right now, as theatre-makers, we're not listening enough,' he says. 'Theatre made during apartheid had a clear 'state of advocacy'. These days, we're all over the place. Under apartheid, the status quo that needed to be defeated was very clear. But what is our status quo today? What are we currently critiquing? What are we challenging? I think we're all over the place. 'After the centuries of coloniality, we should as a nation be asking ourselves more fundamental questions: 'Where are we as the people?' and 'Where do we go from here?' I think those are the stories we, as theatre-makers, should be telling, the ones that pose questions, stories that dare to ask, 'Where in actual fact we are as a nation?'' These are not questions that are answered in Breakfast With Mugabe. The play does not try to patch up the past by offering a theory about the future. Ratladi's hope, though, is that it will perhaps help you to recognise that your perceived reality is a kind of acquiescence to the status quo; if you let it wash through you, it might just wake you up, encourage you to get involved in a consequential conversation that desperately needs to happen. DM Breakfast With Mugabe is a co-production of the National Arts Festival, The Market Theatre and Festival Enterprise Catalyst, in association with the Calvin Ratladi Foundation, with contributing funding from Standard Bank South Africa. It is playing at the Market Theatre until 10 August.
