NYAB Event - Marlene Dumas "Against the Wall"

Marlene Dumas "Against the Wall"

David Zwirner 19th Street

This event has ended.

David Zwirner announces Against the Wall, the first solo exhibition by Marlene Dumas since the artist joined the gallery in 2008. The exhibition features new works from 2009 and 2010. Known for her unique approach to canvas and her thought-provoking subject matter, Marlene Dumas is widely considered one of today’s most important painters. Her work is characterized
by a sensual and gestural technique that is also swift, dry, and minimal, as if under pressure to leave only what is necessary.
While she lives and works in The Netherlands, the artist was born and raised in South Africa, and her paintings have often drawn from her own experiences of living with apartheid. For over thirty years, Dumas has merged political discourse, personal experience, and art historical references in a richly layered body of work. Her paintings integrate complex themes— ranging from segregation, eroticism, or, more generally, the politics of love and war—to explore 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. Dumas’s practice is often based upon the translation of found imagery and explores the tension between the photographic documentation of reality and the constructed, imaginary space of painting. The works in this exhibition
have evolved primarily from media imagery and newspaper clippings documenting Israel and Palestine. However, Dumas’s representations acknowledge universal themes of instability, isolation, and the lack of communication, while moreover addressing the medium of painting as such. The titles of these works (among them Under Construction; Mindblocks; The Wall) not only describe the motifs depicted, but also refer to the artist’s struggle with the boundaries of her chosen medium: as she herself has noted, “A painting needs a wall to object to.”
Dumas’s paintings often display a kind of ambiguity of meaning, employing visual “traps” to show how the mind is quick to assume what is being presented in a given image. Her latest works explore the (in)famous walls of this unstable region of the Middle East.

[Imaga: Marlene Dumas "The Wall" (2009) Oil on canvas, 70 7/8 x 118 1/8 in.]