Marlene Dumas is a South African artist and painter.
Dumas was born in 1953 in Cape Town, South Africa, and grew up in Kuils River in the Western Cape, where her father had a vineyard. She studied art at the University of Cape Town from 1972 to 1975, and then at Ateliers '63 in Haarlem, in North Holland in the Netherlands. She studied psychology at the University of Amsterdam in 1979–1980.
She often uses reference material of polaroid photographs of her friends and lovers, whilst she also references magazines and pornographic material. Marlene Dumas also paints portraits of children and erotic scenes to impact the world of contemporary art. She has said that her works are better appreciated as originals since many of her smaller sexual works are very intimate.
Her first major American museum exhibition, a midcareer retrospective entitled "Measuring Your Own Grave", opened in June 2008 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and moved to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
The sale of Dumas's Jule-die Vrou (1985), positioned Dumas as one of three living female artists to trade for over $1 million.

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