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Artist Marlene Dumas (1953)  

Title The Face of the Painter  

Year 1987  

Material Oil on canvas  

About the work 

The subject and the title of this painting do not seem to match at first. After all, the male figures have no face. Also, they don't really look like typical artists, and they seem a bit lost. The Face of the Painter is not a portrait in the classical sense of the word: it does not put the person at the centre, but depicts an atmosphere, or perhaps an emotion or state of mind.  

About the artist

Marlene Dumas' painting style is idiosyncratic. She often works with cool colours such as blues and greys, applying thin layers of paint with large, fluid strokes. She works from photographs from newspapers and magazines, images from art history, Polaroid photographs and postcards. After studying painting at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, Dumas was given a scholarship to study at the Ateliers '63 postgraduate institute in Haarlem in 1976. She has lived and worked in the Netherlands since then. Her works are shown in major art museums and can be found in art collections around the world.  

In the collection 

Acquired in 1989. The Face of the Painter is the earliest work by Marlene Dumas in De Nederlandsche Bank's art collection. De Nederlandsche Bank subsequently bought several of her lithographs and prints. In De Nederlandsche Bank’s view, art does not always have to be beautiful. This is where Dumas' work fits in. Indeed, she believes beauty cannot exist without also showing the raw edges of human existence. <Read more about the artist>. 

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