Palazzo Grassi presents the great solo exhibition of Marlene Dumas (1953, Cape Town, South Africa), as part of the program of monographs dedicated to great contemporary artists who from 2012 to today alternate with thematic exhibitions of the Pinault Collection.

The exhibition entitled " open-end " is curated by Caroline Bourgeois in collaboration with Marlene Dumas and presents over 100 works, tracing a path focused on her pictorial production, with a selection of paintings and drawings ranging from 1984 to today and unpublished works created in recent years, from the Pinault Collection, from international museums and private collections.

Considered one of the most influential artists in the contemporary art scene, Marlene Dumas was born in 1953 in Cape Town, South Africa where she grew up and studied fine arts during the brutal apartheid regime. In 1976 he moved to Europe to continue his studies and settled in Amsterdam, where he still lives and works today. If in the early years of her career she was known for her collages and texts, Dumas today works mainly with oil on canvas and ink on paper. Most of his production is made up of portraits that represent suffering, ecstasy, fear, despair, but which are often also a comment on the very act of painting.

A crucial aspect of Dumas' work is the use of images from which he draws inspiration, from newspapers, magazines, film stills or Polaroids taken personally. Of her work she declares: “I am an artist who uses second-hand images and first-rate experiences”. Love and death, gender and racial issues, innocence and guilt, violence and tenderness: these are some of the themes of his work, in which the intimate sphere is combined with socio-political issues, news stories or the history of art. All his production is based on the awareness that the endless flow of images from which we are invested daily interferes with the perception of ourselves and our way of reading the world. For Marlene Dumas , painting is a very physical act, which has to do with eroticism and its different stories.