Marlene Dumas is a South African artist and painter currently based in the Netherlands whose figurative work have earned her a place among the most influential painters of the 20th and 21st Centuries. 

The artist often uses polaroids of her friends and lovers as reference material and the main theme of her artworks are sexuality, race, political oppression, innocence, violence and feminism. 

She also depicted notable figures such as Alan Turing, Michelle Obama, Naomi Campbell, Amy Winehouse, and Princess Diana.

She has been the subject of several major solo exhibitions, notably including representing the Netherlands in the 1995 Venice Biennale and a 2015 retrospective at the the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

“ 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. „

—Marlene Dumas