Albino

Since the early 1980s, Marlene Dumas has created paintings and drawings that raise provocative questions about gender, beauty, sexuality, race, and related conditions of oppression and violence. As a white woman who was raised under apartheid rule in South Africa, some of her strongest works tackle complicated themes of racial politics.

This representation of a black African albino suggests that race and color are social constructs that fail to correspond to identity. By choosing a subject whose very existence defies conventional racial categories, and by rendering his skin tone and hair color in a sickly green hue, Dumas pictorially destabilized the division between black and white.