The first mid-career survey in the US of works by this prolific South African painter, Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave features approximately seventy paintings and thirty-five drawings, mostly portraits, ranging in format from small, intimate sketchbooks to large-scale ink-wash drawings and oil paintings. The exhibition is organized by common subjects in Dumas’s oeuvre, including race, as in The White Disease (1985) and the “Man Kind” series; the female nude, represented by The Teacher (sub a) (1987), Miss Pompadour (1999), Cracking the Whip (2000), and others; children, exemplified by Die Baba (1985); and beauty and ugliness, as demonstrated in Models (1994), a group of one hundred serial drawings of expressionistically rendered faces.
The exhibition will travel to the Museum of Modern Art, New York and The Menil Collection, Houston.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue.
Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave is organized by Connie Butler, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.