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.

Marlene Dumas’s 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 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 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.

Issued in connection with an exhibition held at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 6 September 2014-4 January 2015; Tate Modern, London, 5 February-10 May 2015; Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, 30 May-13 September 2015.

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

In her expressionistic drawings and paintings of the last three decades, acclaimed South African artist Marlene Dumas has focused on the human figure, probing themes of love, despair, desire and confusion in order to critique social and political attitudes towards women, children, people of colour and others who have been historically victimized. This substantial, fully illustrated volume, published on the occasion of Dumas's first major American survey, features a newly commissioned essay by renowned scholar Richard Schiff, placing the artist's work in relation to both American figurative painting since the 1980s and Abstract Expressionism. The book also includes curator Cornelia H. Butler's examination of Dumas's photographic sources and shorter texts by Lisa Gabrielle Mark and Matthew Monahan. Writings by the artist, as well as an extensive illustrated exhibition history and bibliography, complete this comprehensive examination of the work of one of the most thought-provoking artists working today.

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

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