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Marlene Dumas Quotes

born 1953 South Africa

Marlene Dumas (born 3 August 1953) in Cape Town, South Africa and grew up in Kuils River in the Western Cape, is a South African artist and painter based in the Netherlands. Dumas witnessed the system of apartheid during her childhood.

South Africa
Painters

Random Marlene Dumas quote

13 quotes

Painting doesn't freeze time. It circulates and recycles time like a wheel that turns. Those who were first might well be last."

” No painting can exist without the tension of what it figures and what it concretely consists of the pleasure of what it could mean and the pain of what it's not.”

There is an element of play to what I do, “where something suddenly appears from something else.”

“If you don’t like gay people, I want the drawings to make you think, ‘What a stupid, horrible person I am.’

I don’t want people in my studio “I want to be alone when I paint.

"I have always been interested in how you can depict suffering without being heavy-handed"

I do not want to be remembered for this, “I would like to be remembered for having done at least one good painting in my life.”

“I don’t have any hobbies, I don’t exercise. I don’t ride a bicycle. I don’t even like brushing my teeth.

I’ve drunk too much for a lot of my life

"My best works are erotic displays of mental confusions (with intrusions of irrelevant information)"

I didn’t even want the trouble of thinking about whether I should do something there or not

"Painting is a very slow art. It doesn't travel with the speed of a light. That's why dead painters shine so bright"

But then I started to look into the stories and tragedies of these people’s lives, and what I found was profoundly upsetting

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Marlene Dumas (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.