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In 1839 when Louis Daguerre introduced the invention of photography to an astonished assembly of artists and scientists, a leading painter declared: “From today painting is dead.” It survived, although in the 1970s conceptual artists declared painting irrelevant to an age saturated in lens-based imagery.
Marlene Dumas’s retrospective exhibition at Tate Modern proves them all wrong, yet it continues the uninterrupted dialogue between painting and photography initiated by Daguerre.
Dumas was born in 1953 to white Afrikaans-speaking farmers in Kuils-rivier, near Cape Town, five years after the establishment of apartheid. After a straight-laced education in a girls’ boarding school she studied fine art in Cape Town in the early 1970s. Her social and cultural horizons widened but there was little original art to be seen and she was taught the Western aesthetic, then dominated by art theory and conceptual art, from art books and journals.
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