This is a lecture about Marlene Dumas' And Luc Tuymans' art practice and similarities in their attitude to painting.

How to work with tragedies, if you are not directly related to them; can you present a series of black portraits (both portraits of black people and portraits of white people painted with black ink) being a white South African artist; how to work with the world/country scale trauma in art, when you feel guilty about it in the second generation/not directly; why was it important for Dumas to paint Chechen terrorist from Nord Ost (being a white South African artist in Netherlands); why painting fading/overexposed architectural details can create an eerie effect; how to show tragedy without showing people; how is it okay to create a work of art, readable/understandable only with the rationale?

Works of Tuymans and Dumas relate to broader themes of the past, historical knowledge and collective memory. But also, as far as they both are working with copyrighted materials (film stills and photographs from media), general theme of copyright could be actual as well.

#painting #history #postmemory #memory #past #reference #media