Post-Modern Figure Painters
Part II
Ceicly Brown born in London in 1969-present
Brown has established herself as one of the key figures in the strong resurgence of painting at the end of the 1990’s.
“Named after the famous Doris Day film, this Pyjama Game has no intention of maintaining a squeaky clean image. Cecily Brown’s painting has all the fun of a screwball comedy. Delightfully
innocent and sophisticated at the same time, a plot laid out in abstract: mistaken identity, sexual innuendo and glamorous design in 1950s red.” http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/cecily_brown.htm
Luc Tuymans born in Belguim1958-present
“If media images inadequately depict the horrors of reality, then Luc Tuymans's paintings are even more disturbingly
detached.” http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/luc_tuymans.htm
Tuyman takes his subjects from imagery of war and violence . Using dull tones, vague
nondescript scenes, he strips the images of their emotion.
Tuymans uses a muted palette to create canvases simultaneously withholding and disarmingly stark explorations into memory social issues.
Jenny Saville born in Cambridge, England 1970-present
Jenny Saville is a real painter’s painter. Her use of thick paint , layered paint has
a sculptural quality.
Saville’s brings up the contrast of the women are perceived and the way that they feel about their bodies.
“One of the most striking aspects of Jenny Saville’s work is the sheer physicality of it. Jenny Saville paints skin with all the subtlety of a Swedish massage; violent, painful,
bruising, bone crunching. “
Marlene Dumas born South Africa 1953
The artist’s self-portrait Het Kwaad is Banaal (Evil is Banal), 1984, oil on canvas, 49 3/16” x 41 5/16”.
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/marlene_dumas.htm
Painting Style
• “Often described as an 'intellectual expressionist', Marlene Dumas blurs the boundaries between painting and drawing.”
• http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/marlene_dumas.htm
• Using washes of oil paint and thick gestural brushwork. Dumas simplifies and distorts her subjects.
Subjects and Sources4• “Dumas works from photos and
pictures found in magazine and film archives. Her paintings act as sociological studies. Subjects, once removed from the photograph, are physically distanced from the viewer by the sparseness of her painting style. “
• She was Influenced by the photographs of Diane Arbus.
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/marlene_dumas.htm
Woman of Algiers, 2001by Marlene Dumas. Oil on Canvas, 78 3/4 x 39 1/2 inches.
•Marlene Dumas’s painting the Woman of Algiers is based on a black-and-white photograph taken in 1960 recording the atrocities of the civil war in Algeria. She appropriated the photo from a old Dutch newspaper.
•The civil war lasted from 1954 to 1962 and resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths (mostly of Algerians).
• Blindfolded, 2001• Reminds us of the
atrocities that are associated with imprisonment and torture.
• Ink wash on papereach 35 x 29
• Marlene Dumas’s "The Visitor" (1995) sold for £3,177,250 ($6,336,072; est. •
£800,000–1.2 million), making it the most expensive work by a living woman •
artist to sell at auction.
