Marlene Dumas

'I use all the cheap tricks of attracting attention: eyes looking at you, sexual parts exposed or deliberately covered. The primitve pull of recognition. The image as prostitute.' Marlene Dumas has been cultivating her very unique position within figurative painting since the early Eighties, focusing on the topic of the human image. The artist does not use models but takes images from the media and popular culture, resorting to her own photographs or pictures from newspapers or television. Dumas does not intend to provoke, but instead raises questions about (gender) identity, oppression, sexual and ethnic violence, the position of women and minorities, always seeking to initiate new thought-processes. This book, featuring the series of drawings Models and Rejects, gives an overview of her work over the last ten years.