Books by Marlene Dumas

Venus & Adonis

by William Shakespeare, Marlene Dumas

At once comic, tragic, and erotic, Venus & Adonis (1593) is a poem by William Shakespeare based on passages from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This new translation by Hafid Bouazza of Shakespeare’s text is illustrated by Marlene Dumas, the renowned painter celebrated around the world for her highly charged depictions of the human form.

Through a series of expressive ink washes, Dumas paints new passion into the poem—bodies bleed into one another, lips part in sighs of passion, a flower blooms to life. Desire in all its heady intensity is evocatively washed over the pages. As with Dumas’s wider body of work, however, tragedy is not forgotten and is frighteningly played out with equal intensity. The owl, “night’s herald,” as Shakespeare writes, flies jet black across the sky; a wild boar looms like a shadow over Adonis’s suffering, wounded body; black dissolves into gray; and bodies are lost in a sea of ink.

The poem tells the story of Venus, the goddess of love, and her attempts to seduce the hunter Adonis. It is a complex, kaleidoscopic work in which love takes center stage—Venus’s lustful yearning for Adonis ripples throughout, each stanza and line tinged with unrequited longing. As Venus declares, “Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry, / Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.” Like Shakespeare before her, Dumas opens up a seemingly unending flow between light and dark, love and death, pleasure and pain.

Dumas’s complete suite of thirty-two works on paper is reproduced in this volume, exactingly placed by the artist throughout Shakespeare’s text. Copublished by Athenaeum and David Zwirner Books as an English/Dutch edition, the book is a striking yet beautiful paradox—a marriage of text and image that is as sensual, fleshy, and carnal as it is unnerving and disturbing.

Marlene Dumas Cycladic Blues at the Cycladic

by Marlene Dumas, Douglas Fogle

This catalogue for an exhibition of work by Marlene Dumas at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens features over 40 paintings and works on paper. It offers a cross-section of the artist’s challenging representations of the human body. The works were gathered from different phases of the artist’s life, in order to make combinations that would make sense to be shown together with works from the museum’s collection, and are grouped into four categories: the family portrait, erotic figure, fragmented body, and portraits of sculptures. In this way her artworks enter into an anachronistic dialogue with the abstracted human forms of Cycladic figurines crafted by unknown artists several millennia ago.

Vija Celmins

by Ilya Kaminsky, Andrew Winer, Marlene Dumas, Glenn Ligon, Katie Farris, Robert Gober

More than 90 of Celmins' astonishing hyperrealistic paintings are contextualized with writings by the artist herself and by luminaries including Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk and Marlene Dumas

Latvian American artist Vija Celmins (born 1938) is a master of subtle visual power. She is best known for her captivating paintings and drawings depicting galaxies, surfaces of the moon, desert floors, oceans and spider webs. Her works are not monumental; they are painted with a restrained palette and defy quick viewing. But once you are involved with them, your gaze gets caught up in them and they unfold their fascination and great beauty. This monograph presents all her approximately 90 exhibited artworks as well as a selection of documentary photographs. Several commentaries by the artist on her works are included, most of them published for the first time. Contributions by renowned authors and artists such as Julian Bell, Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk, Marlene Dumas and Robert Gober provide new perspectives on the artist's impressive oeuvre.