Published on the occasion of the Munch Museum's exhibition "Moonrise, Marlene Dumas & Edvard Munch", 29 September 2018-13 January 2019.

The latest from the renowned painter—Marlene Dumas’s new works respond more than ever to the uncertainty and sensuality of the painting process itself. Allowing the structure of the canvases and the materiality of the paint greater freedom to inform the development of her compositions, the artist has likened the creation of these works to the act of falling in love: an unpredictable and open-ended process that is as filled with awkwardness and anxiety as it is with bliss and discovery. Myths & Mortals documents a selection of new paintings—debuted in the spring of 2018 at David Zwirner, New York—ranging from monumental nude figures to intimately scaled canvases that present details of bodily parts and facial features. Several nearly ten-foot-tall paintings focus on individual figures, including a number of male and female nudes and a seemingly solemn bride, whose expression is obscured behind a floor-length veil. Like the Greek gods and goddesses, the figures in these paintings are at once larger than life and overwhelmingly human. The smaller-scale paintings—referred to by the artist as “erotic landscapes”—present a variety of fragmentary images: eyes, lips, nipples, or lovers locked in a kiss. Evident across all of these works is the artist’s uniquely sensitive treatment of the human form and her constantly evolving experimentation with color and texture. Alongside these new paintings, Dumas presents an expansive series of thirty-two works on paper originally created for a Dutch translation of William Shakespeare’s narrative poem Venus & Adonis (1593) by Hafid Bouazza (2016). Myths & Mortals is accompanied by new scholarship on the artist by Claire Messud and a text by Dumas herself.

"First published 1998, in coproduction of Marlene Dumas."

One of the top-selling female artists in the world, Marlene Dumas is a young painter whose works deal with the cycle of life as well as issues of gender, sexuality, pleasure, and pain. This is an intimate look at her life--and the intellectual, ethical, and moral questions that stimulate and absorb her--as well as a comprehensive catalog of her drawings and paintings. Essays by prominent South African artists and her curator shed light on Dumas as a person as well as her creative work and its perception in the art world.

Edited by Lisa Gabrielle Mark. Text by Cornelia H. Butler, Richard Shiff, Matthew Monahan, Lisa Gabrielle Mark.

Examines how changes from the Industrial Revolution prior to World War I brought about radical transformation in society, changes in education, and massive migration in population that led to one of the bloodiest events in history.

Paul de Moor freezes pictures, snapshots, conversations, impressions and emotions to form a portrait of Luc Tuymans like water turning gradually into ice. In this book de Moor invites the young reader into the strange and gripping world of Luc Tuymans, one of the most important contemporary artists on the international scene. 'My grandfather is a huge hat in the park. His face a black patch under a wide brim. He's holding me firmly by the hand. We're feeding the wild ducks and the geese. It's cold. Ice cold. My grandfather's voice comes from the black patch under the wide brim of his hat. A warm, soft voice. A grandfather voice. A big-hat voice. With stories in. With stories he told me and with stories he would tell me one day.'