Marlene Dumas

Known for: politically charged figurative painting; the Models series

Marlene Dumas grew up in South Africa under apartheid and has lived and worked in Amsterdam since 1976, producing paintings and drawings that address the politics of representation — race, gender, sexuality, death — with a deliberately smudged, liquid technique that refuses the clean surfaces of photorealism. Her source material is consistently photographic — pornography, news images, personal photographs — which she transforms through her working process into something irreducibly painterly. Her The Teacher (Sub A) sold for $6.3 million in 2005.