Marlene Dumas - Litho: The Stars of Heaven - 1983 - Sold

Lithograph by Marlene Dumas from 1983. Title: and that Star of that heaven, fall down to that earth. Printed by Steendrukkerij Amsterdam. A New Year's wish from printer Rento Brattinga and Anna Bodon. Rento Brattinga was the founder of Steendrukkerij Amsterdam in 1977.

Top dimensions: H67 x W50cm. Dimensions: H67 x W49cm. The work is signed by the artist at the bottom right of the print. The authenticity of the work offered is fully guaranteed.

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Marlene Dumas (Cape Town, August 3, 1953) is a South African-born artist. She has lived and worked in Amsterdam since 1976.

Biography

Dumas was born in Cape Town in 1953 and raised on her family's vineyard near the Kuils River, in the southwest of South Africa. She studied painting at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in the 1970s, where she came into contact with art theory and conceptual art. However, she was most influenced by photography, especially the work of Diane Arbus. When she received a scholarship to study at the Dutch artists' institute Ateliers '63, Dumas moved to Amsterdam in 1976, where she still lives and works. During these formative years, Dumas made collages, combined with clipped photographs, text and drawings. Marlene Dumas lived with artist Jan Andriesse until his death in August 2021.

The theme of contrast, which she had to deal with a lot during her life in South Africa during apartheid (whites versus blacks, cultural differences, confrontation of the sexes), influenced her work.

According to Quote in January 2012, Dumas is the richest artist in the Netherlands since the death of Karel Appel in 2006.

Work

Dumas' style leans towards expressionism and conceptual art. Her paintings and watercolors are strongly erotically inspired and are even called pornographic by some. Since Dumas mainly uses photographic sources, she has a large archive of self-shot snapshots, Polaroid photos and thousands of photos torn from magazines and newspapers. However, her paintings are never a literal representation of the photos: for example, she crops the image and only uses a detail of the photo or she uses a different color palette. Her characteristic color palette is gray, blue and red.

In 2006, Dumas painted "The Pilgrim": a portrait of Osama bin Laden, looking with calm eyes and a mild smile, a look that contrasts sharply with the image in the media. Shortly after her mother's death, she painted "Dead Marilyn" in 2008, which was the beginning of a series of portraits of grieving and crying women. "Dead Marilyn" was a painted version of Marilyn Monroe's corpse portrait, which she created into a blotchy whole with gray, blue-green and white brushstrokes. Her painting of a classroom, "The Teacher," was auctioned at Christie's in 2006 for $3.34 million, which was the highest auction price for a living artist at the time. The painting is from 1987 and depicts a class photo of children with a teacher in the middle