Thursday, March 8, 2007



Marlene Dumas' "Euro" and "Lucy" (2000's). Racism, sexuality, religion, motherhood and childhood are all presented with chilling honesty in Dumas' paintings. "Dumas's obsessive return to the human face and figure make her a sort of anti-Richter. She understands that to the model, the camera's indifference is no more absolute than a psychoanalyst's silence is to the patient: Both are flagrant invitations to the melodrama of transference. And we are all models, sooner or later. Or as Dumas describes our yearning relationship with the mechanical eye in the title of a 1997 painting, a group portrait of eight haughty demoiselles stripped down to their frilly white underwear, We Were All in Love with the Cyclops."-- Barry Schwabsky, Art Forum International, January 2000.

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