Marlene Dumas valuation
Paints faces and bodies from photographs in wet, washed oil and ink, raw with tenderness and threat.
Marlene Dumas was born in Cape Town in 1953 and grew up under apartheid at Kuils River in the Western Cape, where her father had a vineyard.
What a work by Marlene Dumas is worth
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Bio
Marlene Dumas was born in Cape Town in 1953 and grew up under apartheid at Kuils River in the Western Cape, where her father had a vineyard. She studied art at the University of Cape Town from 1972 to 1975, moved to the Netherlands in 1976 to attend Ateliers '63 in Haarlem, later studied psychology at the University of Amsterdam, and has lived and worked in Amsterdam since. She paints and draws figures, babies, lovers, strippers, the dead and the famous, from photographs, Polaroids and press images, in loose, wet oil and ink wash that turn portraits into emotional states. She represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale in 1995. Since 2014 she has made Great Men, ink portraits of men persecuted for being gay, and in 2025 her nine-part series Liaisons entered the permanent collection of the Louvre.
Her paintings are few and most are in museums or major collections; ink drawings and works on paper appear more often, and many belong to series, so the exact work and its place in the series matter. Provenance through her galleries and exhibition history are the first questions.
Cape Town, Amsterdam and the Louvre
Measuring Your Own Grave, her first American retrospective, opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2008 and travelled to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The Image as Burden, a retrospective of 2014 and 2015, was shown at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Tate Modern and the Fondation Beyeler.
Venus and Adonis, Great Men and the Louvre
Dumas began painting in 1973, as a student in Cape Town, examining her position as a white woman of Afrikaans descent. She works wet into wet, setting thin layers of paint against thick, in oil on canvas and ink on paper, and draws on Polaroids of friends and lovers as well as on magazines and pornography. She has taught at the academies in Tilburg and Enschede, at the Rijksakademie and at De Ateliers in Amsterdam, and holds an honorary degree from the University of Antwerp.
In 2015 and 2016 she illustrated Hafid Bouazza's Dutch translation of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. Frieze put Great Men at number 14 in its list of the 25 best works of the 21st century. Liaisons, the nine paintings that entered the Louvre in December 2025, made her the first contemporary woman artist in its permanent collection, hung in the Gallery of the Five Continents in the Denon Wing. She has been represented by David Zwirner since 2008, and the films about her include Miss Interpreted, of 1997, and Kentridge and Dumas in Conversation, of 2009.
Best auction results
- Miss January $13.6m
- Oil on canvas, 1997 · New York · 14 May 2025
- Publicly reported
- At the time of sale, the highest price at auction for a work by a living woman artist.
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
