Customer Reviews

Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave

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This is a definitive book on the paintings of Marlene Dumas, created to accompany the first large travelling retrospective of her work in North America at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. (The exhibition "Measuring Your Own Grave," also just completed a 3 month showing at MOMA in NYC.) The book includes texts written by Cornelia Butler, Marlene Dumas, Lisa Gabrielle Mark, Matthew Monohan, and Richard Shiff. The many images are beautifully reproduced and Dumas' process, including her photographs and newspaper photos, which directly influenced her paintings, is deeply explored from the differing perspectives of the writers. It's a fascinating account of this brilliant artist.

This is a splendid monograph on the South African artist Marlene Dumas and represents a thorough mid career retrospective. It is a given that Dumas is one of the more important painters painting today, but the manner in which this book takes the reader on the journey of her development as an artist is as fine as any monograph on any artist in publication. Serving as a massive catalogue for the 2008 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the written word - in the form of Jeremy Strick's Introduction and the four essays by Cornelia Butler, Richard Shiff, Lisa Gabrielle Mark, and Matthew Monahan - is not only additive to the book, it is also additive to the exhibition. Few who take the time to read as well as peruse the many excellent color reproductions of Dumas' art as well as fragments of occasional instigating photographs that influences sectors of Dumas' art will come away less than overwhelmed by the content of the catalogue as well as the power of Marlene Dumas as an artist.

Butler opens her initial essay 'Painter as Witness' with an apropos quote by another artist observer of the human condition, Leon Golub: 'I was looking for images to somehow show the coruscating nature of what the world was about - in a way, survival, you see? And the savagery of war and the savagery of human relations in general...My dilemma was in the world of events, the event-world. How to make contact.' She then summarizes Dumas' power: 'Portraits of the living, portraits of the dead, horizontals, groups, dead girls, big babies, crying women - this is the shorthand, the typology of the subjects Marlene Dumas has used in her ongoing exploration of portraiture.' And after the power of his introduction the reader is gifted with nearly 300 pages of the works by this great artist. There are portraits of mankind at the brutal treatment of 'civilization', references to the struggles in South Africa, war in general, the degradation of prostitution, works that ponder on pornography in much the same influence as Egon Schiele. MEASURING YOUR OWN GRAVE is not only the title of one of the paintings in this exhibition and catalogue, it is also a thematic concern of Dumas. These are small works and monumental works that force us to face that part of the travels through life and the darker interstices we avoid. Marlene Dumas is a brilliant artist and even more: she is a contemporary philosopher and observer who is unafraid to make us look more closely at this globe on which we briefly live. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, February 10

I bought this for my daughter who is in art school in Boston. She loves it. She told me the quality is very good and is happy to have it in her collection.

Very nice, and complete catalog of exhibit at Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The Amazon price was far less than the price at the gallery, and the book arrived quickly in perfect condition.

This book is well-printed with a large selection of high-quality images of Marlene Dumas' paintings. There's also a good deal of dense (but not taxing!) text to provide context for the art.