Marlene DUMAS

Presented at the Central Pavilion of the Venice Biennale with 36 vanities, Marlene DUMAS (b. 1953) also exhibited this year at the Beyeler Foundation (31 May to 6 September 2015) after shows at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam and the Tate Modern in London. So… a busy year indeed for this South African artist, who arrived in the Netherlands in 1976 (year of the Soweto schoolgirl riots) and whose career took off with her participation in the dOCUMENTA 9 (1992) and the 1995 Venice Biennale (where she represented the Netherlands). In 2008, news of a retrospective¹ at the prestigious Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and then New York’s MoMA drove bidding for her canvas The Visitor up to $6.3 million². Always subject to strong demand, her works are better represented in major international art fairs³ than at auctions, but this controlled scarcity is not detrimental to her prices. On the contrary, it stimulates the avidity of collectors. We saw proof of this in December 2014 when her large drawing Loreley was offered for sale at Christie’s New York. Estimated between $100,000 and $150,000, the work fetched $533,000.