Marlene Dumas is one of the most prominent and influential painters working today. In an era dominated by the mass media and a proliferation of images, her work is a testament to the meaning and potency of painting. Dumas draws on her expansive visual archive and the nuances of language to create intense, psychologically charged works which explore themes such as sexuality, love, death and guilt, often referencing art history and current affairs. Her paintings and drawings are characterized by their extraordinary expressiveness and sometimes controversial subject matter. This fully illustrated exhibition catalogue accompanies a major exhibition at the Tate Modern, the Stedelijk Museum and the Fondation Beyeler. Surveying the artist's oeuvre from the mid-70s to the present, it features over 100 of her most important paintings and drawings alongside lesser-known works from the early period of her career. "The Image as Burden" also includes a new interview with the artist; extracts from previously published but lesser-known texts (some available in English for the first time); and a new short story from prize-winning author Colm Toibin written in response to the paintings. Essays and texts from a wide range of contributors examine the key themes and motifs in her work and reflect on Dumas' entire career.
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1953, Marlene Dumas has lived in Amsterdam since 1976. Over the last three decades she has had numerous solo exhibitions throughout Europe and the U.S., including shows at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Newly reprinted, Against the Wall includes large-scale works primarily based on media imagery and newspaper clippings documenting the conflict between Israel and Palestine, exploring the tension between the photographic documentation of reality and the constructed, imaginary space of painting. Originally published in 2010 on the occasion of Against the Wall, Dumas's first solo presentation at David Zwirner in New York, this much sought-after exhibition catalogue-which sold out shortly after publication-has been reprinted to coincide with the artist's 2014-2015 European retrospective exhibition The Image as Burden, organized by Tate Modern, London in collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and the Fondation Beyeler, Basel. Described by Deborah Solomon in a New York Times profile as "one of contemporary art's most compelling painters," Marlene Dumas has continuously explored the complex range of human emotions, often probing questions of gender, race, sexuality, and economic inequality through her dramatic and at times haunting figural compositions. Throughout her career, the internationally renowned artist has continually created lyrically charged compositions that eulogize the frailties of the human body, probing issues of love and melancholy. At times her subjects are more topical, merging socio-political themes with personal experience and art-historical antecedents to reflect unique perspectives on the most salient and controversial issues facing contemporary society. The large-scale works included in Against the Wall are primarily based on media imagery and newspaper clippings documenting the conflict between Israel and Palestine, exploring the tension between the photographic documentation of reality and the constructed, imaginary space of painting. The Wall, the painting that began the series, at first appears to present a scene at the Western Wall (also known as the Wailing Wall), an important site of religious pilgrimage located in Jerusalem. However, this work is based upon a photograph from a newspaper that portrayed a group of Orthodox Jews on their way to pray at Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem. Through her delicate treatment of every scene, Dumas destabilizes preconceived notions about what, in fact, is being pictured-engaging the often ambiguous nature of ideas like truth or justice. "In a sense they are my first landscape paintings," Dumas further notes in the catalogue, "or should I say 'territory paintings.' That is why they are so big." The somber color plates reproduced in the publication are given context by Dumas's own musings, a text framed as a letter to David Zwirner in which she tries to tell him "about the 'why' " of this powerful series.