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| Porno Blues, 1993, Ink wash, watercolour on paper, 6 drawings, 30.5x22.5 cm |
In two series of drawings both made in 1993. Porno Blues and Porno as a Collage. Dumas used pages from sex magazines as her source material, investigating the interplay between photography's photographic revelations and the veilings and concealments of art, which are widely held to be distinguishing features of eroticism. Marlene Dumas has been laced in the tradition of Expressionism and compared to Edvard Munch and Emil Nolde.
Due to her ironic view of painting's production and perception she has also been considered a neo-conceptualist.
A further dimension in her work of the 1990s has been a distinctive exploration of eroticism. Although Dumas' imagery of predominantly female subject is often derived from mass-media photographic sources, she is not interested in strategies of refusal, or the constriction of 'anti-images' as a way of subverting stereotypical representations. Rather, through exploring the sensuous properties of her medium, she aims to expand the possibilities in painting for representation of the workings of desire.
