Who else needs a Sunday pick-me-up? This haunting painting is the work of the celebrated South African artist Marlene Dumas. Its title, The Image as Burden, was also used for the 2015 retrospective of Dumas’ work at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and reflects the artist’s singular working methods, which draw on her personal archive of news clippings, magazine articles and photographs to pose questions to her viewers. “She’s asking us to look at how we create an image of somebody in our mind,” curator Leontine Coelewij explained to Grace Banks in Elephant Issue 20. “She takes a newspaper clipping and through recreating it shows that images must be reinterpreted. She’s been doing this since the 1970s—researching the meaning of the image.”
