Described in a 2008 New York Times profile as ‘one of contemporary art’s most compelling painters’, Marlene Dumas has continuously explored the complex range of human emotions, often probing questions of gender, race, sexuality, and economic inequality through her dramatic and at times haunting figural compositions.

Originally published in 2010 on the occasion of Against the Wall, Dumas’s first solo presentation at David Zwirner in New York, this much sought-after exhibition catalogue – which sold out shortly after publication – has been reprinted in 2014 to coincide with the artist’s European retrospective exhibition The Image as Burden, organized by Tate Modern, London, in collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Fondation Beyeler, Basel, traveling through 2015.

The large-scale works included in Against the Wall are primarily based on media imagery and newspaper clippings documenting Israel and Palestine, exploring the tension between the photographic documentation of reality and the constructed, imaginary space of painting. The sombre colour plates reproduced in the publication are given context by Dumas’s own musings, a text framed as a letter to David Zwirner in which she tries to tell him ‘about the why’ of this powerful series.