30 Quotes by Marlene Dumas

I have always been interested in how you can depict suffering without being heavy-handed.

There is no beauty, if it doesn’t show some of the terribleness of life.

Drawings are only a few lines on paper. Therefore it’s easy to carry around in plastic bags. Drawings are cheaper than paintings. They don’t pretend they’ll last forever.

Painting doesn’t freeze time. It circulates and recycles time like a wheel that turns. Those who were first might well be last. Painting is a very slow art. It doesn’t travel with the speed of light. That’s why dead painters shine so bright.

What a funny thing painting is. The abstract painters always insist on their connection with the visible reality, while the so called figurative artists insist that what they really care about, is the abstract qualities of life.

No painting can exist without the tension of what it figures and what it concretely consists of. The pleasure of what it could mean and the pain of what it’s not.

I think I am probably a lot like my father.

When Black and White are colors and not races, people will still fall in love and discriminate between partners and feel sad and bad and need art that breaks your heart and takes you to those places where pain becomes beauty.

At the moment my art is situated between the pornographic tendency to reveal everything and the erotic inclination to hide what it’s all about.