BREAKING #306

‘I’m not a performing monkey’

Nicole Ex

Column

March 2026

Nicole Ex

is a writer, art historian, and founder of See All This art magazine. Since 2020, she writes a weekly column for the BREAKING-the-week art newsletter.

Column

March 2026

‘Hello, ladies of See All This. I just wanted to share something cheerful… Look what I found: a clipping from May 2023, torn out of Volkskrant’s Weekend Guide and kept because I thought her choices were so refreshing. When I met her now, in 2026, I had absolutely no idea that she had already caught my eye once before. That’s really so lovely. Warmly, Marlene xx’

Marlene Dumas’s archives. How they function, I haven’t the faintest idea, but from piles of newspapers and magazines she produces all sorts of things that rhyme with, and fit, whatever she’s working on. I mean: how does she suddenly come up with this 2023 clipping about Sanja Marušić – the photographer I asked a few weeks ago to come to Marlene’s studio to make a portrait?

Her studio is not in Cape Town, as most people think, but in Amsterdam. It sits behind garage doors that give nothing away about the scale of her artistic practice, or about the impressive work she creates there. Beneath the doorbell there’s a strip of tape with her surname written on it in marker.

Fresh-faced Sanja arrived with her brother, who’d been roped in to help her with the lighting. We were looking for a place to take a photo of Marlene, Sarah, and me for the summer issue of See All This. In her studio, I hoped. But Marlene does not allow herself to be captured as ‘the painter with a brush in hand in the studio with work against the wall’: ‘I’m not a performing monkey.’

It became an easy, informal session between the desks and the kitchen table – where we’d also sat during our first meeting. When she casually suggested making the cover? ‘Oh, we’ll see about that,’ I said as nonchalantly as I could. She looked up, surprised, and caught my smile. Of course we want a cover by her!

By now, she’s sent it over by email! Good? Just wait and see!*

— Nicole Ex,
editor in chief

* The summer issue featuring Marlene Dumas explores the theme The Body: The Political and the Sensual and is expected around 27 June.