Marlene Dumas’s subjects range from giant babies to the dead, victims of violent crime shown with limbs sprawled and mouths agape. In between, she has depicted schoolchildren, strippers, terrorists, models, actors, the bereaved and Jesus on the cross, dying abandoned and alone. She never uses models but instead works from found images, photographs, film stills and illustrations from art history, exploring the boundaries of what painting can do in an era of pervasive imagery. She is now recognised as one of the greatest living artists, and her work is the subject of a wide-ranging retrospective that opened at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam last year, travelled to Tate Modern in London and has now opened at the Fondation Beyeler (until 6 September).
Born and raised on a wine farm in Kuils River, near Cape Town, Dumas studied at the University of Cape Town before leaving South Africa for the Netherlands on a two-year scholarship in 1976. She never moved back home, and today lives and works in Amsterdam. Her formative years during apartheid are often used as a key to interpret her paintings, so we asked her about the limits of using her biography to understand her art, and about her exhibition’s current incarnation in Basel.
The Art Newspaper: David Zwirner (G8), who has represented you since 2008, has said: “There is usually a certain outrage that will trigger Dumas’s images. This is the engine that drives the meaning of her work and ultimately makes it so powerful, political and raw. You can’t really understand this unless you realise that apartheid wasn’t abolished in South Africa until the early 1990s. I think that this is always with her and drives her moral compass.” Do you agree?
Marlene Dumas: Yes, I agree, but we also know that, after Freud, we don’t know why we’re doing most of what we do, and we are not who we think we are most of the time. All art is essentially a Rorschach test.
What do we miss by always wanting to impose your personal biography on your work?
You miss looking at the characteristics of the work itself. You miss seeing that Evil is Banal has got no nose, that Measuring your own Grave is an active painting and that The Skull [of a woman] is elongated. You miss looking at what the painting does if you too anxiously try to find what it [is supposed to] mean, and you miss what the works do to each other.
In an interview in the exhibition catalogue, you talk about the Black Drawings (1991-92), a series of portrait heads of black men. You say: “It was the first work in which I used a large amount of black ink, so I wasn’t pleased when people wrote about it as if it was only about apartheid. It was not only about political problems but also about blackness as a positive state and honouring black as a beautiful colour.” Isn’t the “honouring of blackness” in itself political? Or are you talking purely about aesthetics? When I look at these drawings, I see black faces first, not black ink.
Yes, it is political, although it is a pity that it is not seen as normal. One should see both at the same time: the black faces [the subject matter] and the black ink [the medium and the method]. The medium does matter. The style matters. Jesus Serene is just as political if you place it in our global culture. Aesthetics is part of ethics. Why hasn’t anyone asked me: why are these Jesus guys [you paint] all so pale and white? Why did Eldridge Cleaver [the late American writer and leader of the Black Panther movement] or Dollar Brand [the South African jazz pianist Abdullah Abrahim] become Muslim? Why do art magazines prefer to have my Naomi [Campbell] rather than my painting of [the South African artist] Moshekwa on their covers?
How is the exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler different from the previous versions at Tate Modern and the Stedelijk?
To start with, there is a different curator, Theodora Vischer, and a different space. There is not one room that has exactly the same combination of works as in either the Stedelijk or Tate Modern. There are 18 paintings that haven’t been in any of the other venues, and also some groups of drawings… and there is daylight!
Is there any work that is not included but that you would have really liked to be there?
Retrospectives are always just one possible take on an artist’s work. There are always too many works to choose from. I always think I should have left out more, rather than missing works that are equally good [and have not been included]. For me, a museum show is a constant dialogue with the curator[s] and her [or his] views. We make it together.
You write in the catalogue that you suffered as a result of choosing a chronological arrangement for the exhibition. Why?
I am not really a linear thinker or doer. I’m not an artist who finishes certain styles and themes. Ideas get recycled. In the end, the Beyeler did not stick to a strict chronological installation, either.
When you saw the exhibition at the Stedelijk, Tate Modern and then the Beyeler, did you feel as though it was a fair representation of your career as an artist?
As I write in my introduction in the catalogue, quoting Salman Rushdie: “All stories are haunted by the ghosts of the stories they might have been.”
Were you surprised by anything you saw in the show? For example, did you see anything that you had not seen for a long time that you really liked or disliked?
Yes. Because of the daylight. The colours come out of their artificial closets. On that level, there were many surprises. On the “dislike level”, I’ll leave that open.
You paint images based on photographs. Would it be fair to describe your work as mediated reality? Have you ever had any interest in painting fictional scenes that you imagined yourself and that were not based on the fictions imagined by others, such as films?
I do paint scenes that I imagine myself. I use the photographs to make contact with and to create relationships to the works of others. But a painting, however mediated, is always its own reality in the end. Even when it is a terrible imitation of the work of another, it carries the psychology or intention of its maker. The Painter started with a snapshot taken in a garden on a summer’s day, but I’ve never seen a three-year-old girl who is two metres tall, standing naked in icy flat space, before I actually painted it.
If the Beyeler was struck by a hurricane and you only had time to save one work from your show, what would you choose?
I would save The Painter and, as a close second, Waiting (for Meaning).
Your Beyeler exhibition opens shortly before the opening of Art Basel. Will you be visiting the fair?
Art fairs—no. I prefer exhibitions. I don’t even like shopping as such. But then again, one can always find an exception to the rule. For example, I have two beautiful, small photographs by Dora Maar.
You are often described as “the world’s most expensive living female painter”. You find this infuriating. Why?
That was for a short while… it is not even applicable any more. Do we ever say that Picasso is the world’s most expensive male painter? No; he is an artist. And he is famous for achieving things—why or what am I honoured or wanted for? Does anyone know? You tell me. Also, for me, “most expensive” is almost synonymous with “most corrupt” or something else negative.
If you had an unlimited amount of money to spend on art, what would you buy?
I don’t have to own the things I like most. It is wonderful that Holbein’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb is in [the Kunstmuseum] Basel, in a museum collection.
• Marlene Dumas, Fondation Beyeler, until 6 September