Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave is the first mid-career survey of the work of Marlene Dumas (b. 1953, Cape Town, lives in Amsterdam) to be organized by an American institution. Dumas’s rigorous investigation of the human condition is manifested through portraiture, figuration, and her ongoing, painterly exploration of the body. The exhibition, which includes over 100 paintings and drawings, is organized according to specific subjects Dumas has examined throughout her 30-year career, including children, pregnant women, the dead, and the female nude. Rather than a chronological installation, the exhibition is organized thematically, inviting new associations between bodies of work and suggesting different relationships between subjects. In this way, each work is not closed to a specific interpretation, rather spectators are invited to participate in the creation of meaning. Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave is organized by Connie Butler, MOCA Ahmanson curatorial fellow and The Robert Lehman Foundation chief curator of drawings at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, which will offer a comprehensive and scholarly examination of the artist’s career with new texts by Connie Butler, MOCA Director of Publications Lisa Gabrielle Mark, art historian Richard Shiff, artist Matthew Monahan, as well as new writings by the artist, and an extensive exhibition history and bibliography. Following its debut at MOCA, the exhibition will travel to MoMA from December 14, 2008 to February 16, 2009 and The Menil Collection, Houston, from March 26 to June 21, 2009.