Marlene Dumas - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Friday, October 17, 2008 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Acquired directly from the artist; Private collection, Europe

  • Exhibited

    Amsterdam, Theatermuseum, Theater Institute Nederland, 15 April - 3 July, 2000; Gent, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.MA.K.), 10 September - 22 October, 2000; Anton Corbijn, Marlene Dumas: Stripping Girls

  • Literature

    Exhibition catalogue, Theatermuseum, Theater Institute Nederland, Anton Corbijn, Marlene Dumas: Stripping Girls, Amsterdam, 2000 (illustrated); U. Grosenick, ed., Women Artist in the 20th Century, Cologne, 2001, p. 111 (illustrated) 

  • Catalogue Essay

    Since the early 1970s Marlene Dumas has been painting images that have placed her within the cutting-edge of contemporary painting. Her canvases, although containing faint art historical allusion to the works of Egon Schiele, Hans Holbeine and Francis Bacon, are unique in style: combining her deft abilities as a painter along with her 21st century-inspired questions about the nature of humankind and her explorations into Conceptualism. Born in South Africa, Dumas has lived and worked in Amsterdam for the past two decades. It was in Amsterdam that she completed, in 2000, a collaboration with photographer Anton Corbijn, the series entitled ‘Stripping Girls’ of which the present lot, Cleaning the Pole is part.

    Marlene Dumas has come to her prominence with her ability to create provocative and challenging representations of women, children, and people on the underbelly of society with a pallet that has become one of the defining features of her work. Dumas is known for creating ashy images with a unique interplay of hues and colours that do not always bond with the figure being depicted yet continuingly succeeding in heightening the psychological drama of the subject. In this present lot the deathly pale redheaded figure is outlined with and immersed in a warm red glow that serves to maximize the sensuality of the pose offsetting and contrasting the suppleness of the skin which mirrors the vulnerability and power held within the model.

    The human female nude within the cannon of art remains to be one of the most popular of themes. Sensuous, voluptuous, provocative – the female form has inspired artists for centuries and still remains to be a muse up to the present day. For Dumas the female nude is a source of beauty and power, an investigation and subsequent interpretation and personal inflection. Dumas has addressed the numerous roles that women have assumed in society, such as mother, daughter, sinner and saint. It is in this series that Dumas presents the archetypal female figure as a source of desire and titillation though they hold within them a sense of vulnerability guised by a shrewd shell of power and anonymity.     

    The white of the figure’s skin and her classic pose is reminiscent of a marble Hellenistic sculpture. The model’s suggestive pose, pushed up against the pole and stretched across the entirety of the canvas, with her face shied away becomes a modern day Fertility Goddess, anonymous, seductive and powerful. Dumas’ work provides no comfort to the viewer and is presented with chilling honesty and unmitigated horror. The ‘Stripping Girls’ are often portrayed in a melancholic and almost pathetic way, sometimes embarrassing, often vicious, but always disconcertingly familiar. As a female artist Dumas is able to reach the soul of the subject while her working method of photographing the subject matter and then painting from the image creates a vital distance that allows the artist to be honest and cruel. Dumas’s women appear like whispers of a dream spilled across the canvas. Each stroke captures a gesture, a provacating current that is as raw in the final image as it was the moment it was applied. The figure maintains a unique formal delicacy while confronting the viewer with unquestionable strength.      

    “You enter the theatre of seduction. You pay for this pleasure to quiver with anticipation. You stick to the rules. Strippers might stretch the rules. You don’t. You have to know your place. You have come, so that she can make you wait.” (Marlene Dumas quoted in Anton Coubijn, Marlene Dumas: Stripping Girls, February 2003)

    Marlene Dumas’s work intrigues the viewer of the complex nature of the resistance it offers. Not only does it resist a description of its painterly and formal properties, owing to the subtlety and calculated randomness of the application of paint, but the ambiguity of the work’s content also resists interpretation. It must also be said that no account of this painter’s work can ever be exhaustive, because each painting is a unique, fused amalgam of expressive marks on the canvas, bursting with all kinds of autobiographical, socio-critical, psychological, ethical, biblical, cultural, and folkloristic references. (Marlene van Niekerk, ‘Mass for The Painter’, in Marlene Dumas \ Intimate Relations, South Africa, 2007, p.111)

316

Cleaning the Pole

2000
Oil on canvas.
229.9 x 60 cm. (90 ½ x 23 5/8 in).
Signed, titled and dated 'M. Dumas Cleaning the Pole 2000' on the reverse.

Estimate
£400,000 - 600,000 ‡♠

Sold for £553,250

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

18 Oct 2008, 7pm
London