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.
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