Marlene Dumas - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Friday, October 17, 2008 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp 

  • Catalogue Essay

    Dumas herself elaborates on how she thinks about painting. ‘Painting is about the trace of the human touch. It is about the skin of a surface.’ Some paintings don’t want to come to life. Or it takes a long time to bring them tolife. ‘A painting’, she says, ‘is something you have to get up close to.To see, you have to get intimate. If a painting doesn’t change as you get closer, it is not a good painting.’ Intimacy, for her, is about seeing as such, it is theground of perception, its condition. Contrary to a language of critical distance, so often invoked as a condition of knowing, she suggests that knowledge is to be found in closeness, can be articulated on in terms of the close up. ‘I treat painting’, Dumas says, ‘as a lover treats a beloved.’ (A. Mbembe and S. Nuttall, ‘The Human Face’, Marlene Dumas \ Intimate Relations, South Africa, 2007, p. 127)

337

Three Female Busts from the Sixties

1993
Oil on canvas in three parts.
Each: 30 x 24 cm. (11 7/8 x 9 1/2 in).
Signed 'M. Dumas' on the reverse of each panel; titled '3 female busts from the sixties' on the reverse of the third panel.  

Estimate
£200,000 - 300,000 

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

18 Oct 2008, 7pm
London