About This Artwork

Since the early 1980s, Marlene Dumas has created figurative paintings and ink-wash drawings that raise provocative questions about gender, beauty, sexuality, race, and attendant conditions of oppression and violence. Characterized by loose brushwork and a subjective use of color, her works merge art-historical and mass-media references with private, autobiographical allusions. As a white woman who was raised under apartheid rule in South Africa, some of her strongest works tackle complicated themes of racial politics. This representation of a black African albino suggests that race is a social construct that fails to correspond to identity. By choosing a subject whose very existence complicates the notion of categorization, and by rendering his skin tone and hair color in a sickly green hue, Dumas pictorially destabilized the division between black and white.