Marlene Dumas, a South Africa-born, Amsterdam-based painter, is one of the world's most admired artists, a titan of contemporary painting. Her work recalls the painterly gestures of Expressionism while combining the critical distance of conceptual art with the pleasures of eroticism. Through her delicately painted oil-on-canvas or ink-and-watercolor depictions of the female form as well as portraits of children and erotic scenes, she makes a commentary on the state of painting today. What does it mean to be a woman working within the predominantly male genre of expressionist painting? The artist often depicts women: their expressions, their bodies, their facial typologies, their self-image, and their ideals.The relationship between art and female beauty or between art-historical models and twentieth-century supermodels are constant themes in Dumas' work. She does not paint from life but deliberately chooses 'stock' images from a variety of sources, from magazine cuttings to picture pos
