Marlene Dumas, Tate Modern ★★★★★

Below is our preview, which explains the background of the show. Click here to read our Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden review.

Somewhat unusually for a non-European female artist, Marlene Dumas is regarded as one of the most prominent painters working today. With the Stedeljik Museum Amsterdam this year highlighting Marlene Dumas, Tate Modern in London will take up the mantle in their Tate 2015 exhibitions with the largest ever retrospective of Marlene Dumas’ paintings. This show is sure to be one of the best London exhibitions of the spring so be sure to book tickets. 

Marlene Dumas biography

Born in 1953 in South Africa, Marlene Dumas has lived and worked in Amsterdam since 1976. Through her focus on the human figure she has developed a painterly language that merges personal experience with current affairs, conjuring a unique perspective on contemporary issues.

Marlene Dumas art

For the last 40 odd years, Dumas has created an intimate and personal visual language. Undeniably unique, she relies on intensely charged imagery which she draws from popular culture, media affairs and the cult of celebrity. Her figurative works therefore question the tenuous line between the private and public spheres. Perhaps thanks to her colonial past, Dumas is also crucially unafraid of being controversial: frequently touching upon subjects of post-colonial society, religious subjects and contemporary anxieties about gender and economic inequality.

Tate Modern exhibition 2015

From her early works on paper made in South Africa through to her most iconic paintings, experimental collages and her most recent canvases, this exhibition will certainly not leave you disappointed. Amongst the Tate Modern gallery London highlights are the rarely seen drawings from the early years of Dumas’ career when she first arrived in Europe as well as her very unusual photographs. Expect to be immersed in Marlene Dumas’ images and her unique world: a place obsessed with notions of identity and inhabited by eerie human forms.

Whilst direct and expressive, this Marlene Dumas exhibition at the Tate Modern art gallery is politically powerful and provides a refreshing approach to modern art painting. One of our pick of the top 10 art exhibitions in London, this will be very popular. You have been warned...