"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."
"I have always been interested in how you can depict suffering without being heavy-handed."
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Source: Marlene Dumas, Emma Bedford, Standard Bank Centre Art Gallery (2007). “Marlene Dumas: Intimate Relations”, p.42, Jacana Media
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"There is no beauty, if it doesn't show some of the terribleness 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."
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"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."
"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."