Marlene Dumas was born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1953. From 1972 to 1975, she attended the University of Cape Town, earning a BA in Visual Arts before finishing her studies in Haarlem, the Netherlands. Dumas’s artistic production stretches across the realm of painting, collage, drawing, print, and installation. Although her paintings often depict portraits of people and nude bodies, they are not a simple representation of any real person. Rather, they epitomize a certain feeling or state of mind. Themes central to her work include guilt and innocence, violence and tenderness.