Marlene Dumas

Marlene Dumas’s complex and powerful art probes questions of gender, race, sexuality, and economic inequality. Born in 1953 in Cape Town, South Africa, she studied at the University of Cape Town before moving to The Netherlands in the late 1970s to study painting and psychology. Her studio is still based in Amsterdam. Since 2008, she has been represented by David Zwirner and her work is held in museum collections worldwide, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Tate Gallery, London. For 2014’s Manifesta 10 art biennale in St Petersburg, Marlene created a portrait series of 16 gay men, to be exhibited in the city’s State Hermitage Museum, following the Russian government’s controversial anti-gay legislation the previous year.