1994
201.0 x 100.0 cm
マルレーン・デュマ(1953年生まれ)は、人種、セクシュアリティ、アイデンティティ、そして脆弱性をテーマに、感情豊かな肖像画を描くことで知られる南アフリカの画家です。現代を代表するロマン主義的アーティストの一人です。
Although based on a snapshot of Dumas’s daughter finger painting on a hot summer day, the child in The Painter is far removed from the little girl in the photograph. Dumas intentionally uses an aesthetic of the indistinct; the thinly painted background and the unevenly colored figure—sketchy in part and incomplete at the feet—reveal the artist’s fascination with the expressive qualities of non finito. The abstract, painterly characteristics of the work, as well as its generalizing title, also serve to displace the subject from any real-life context into an allegorical realm. As such, The Painter speaks to the almost primal urge to leave creative marks on the world.