SCARCE!! MARLENE DUMAS `INTIMATE RELATIONS` FIRST EDITION

SCARCE!! MARLENE DUMAS "INTIMATE RELATIONS" FIRST EDITION, 2005 HARDCOVER, EXCELLENT CONDITION

Iziko South African National Gallery, 8 November 2007 - 13 January 2008

Johannesburg, Standard Bank Gallery, 6 February - 29 March 2008

Dumas' first solo show in South Africa after moving to The Netherlands 30 years ago provided occasion for this catalogue. Featured are more than 50 paintings, drawings and prints presented at the exhibition, as well as personal letters, documents and photographs collected by the artist. A selection of the artist's own writings is included, ranging from her unique commentaries on art to aphoristic writings and poetry that are once insightful, witty and thought-provoking.

Writing about her erotic works in the catalogue to MARLENE DUMAS: Intimate Relations, Emma Bedford, who co-curated the exhibition writes: "It is the artist's unashamed and apologetic depiction of the human bodythat confronts viewers' expectations. The complete absence of a tradition of the nude in South Africa, and the vexed issues of censorship and sexual abuse in this country, have meant that many local spectators are uncomfortable with viewing the body as a purely aesthetic object and have come to expect from art a discernable moral directive. In addition, feminist and identity discourses have required that bodies be contextualised within defined discourses and debates. But Dumas will have none of this. While she does not deny such contexts, she offers us instead the thing in itself as an object of beauty: a source of delight as the focus of intimacy".

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