Marlene DumasSouth African, 1953Albino
About the painting
Since the early 1980s, Marlene Dumas has created paintings and drawings that raise provocative questions about gender, beauty, sexuality, race, and related conditions of oppression and violence. 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 and color are social constructs that fail to correspond to identity. By choosing a subject whose very existence defies conventional racial categories, and by rendering his skin tone and hair color in a sickly green hue, Dumas pictorially destabilized the division between black and white.
Art Institute of ChicagoCC BY 4.0
Particulars
- Accession number
- 2002.597
