Charlotte Dumas is an artist of intimate, tranquil portraits of animals. In Paradis it is the first time she combines a selection out of the various series of animal portraits. This creates new relations between the portraits of horses, wolves and tigers and the mutual relation between the different objects becomes clear.
The first selection of animal portraits of Charlotte Dumas is a series about police dogs. Next there are presentations in which, amongst others, police horses, army horses, a tiger and, recently, curs form the object. Dumas chooses animals tamed and trained by people and used for different purposes. Every single animal lives within the human domain, often in captivity. Dumas captures the animals in a classic way and nearly always centrally portrayed.
The psychology of the portrait plays an import role. In my work I like to show the way we look at animals and what we learn from them. Animals have a double meaning for people. On the one hand we consider them to be imperfect. On the other hand animals are very important to us because we identify ourselves with them. I am very interested in the symbolic of this relation between humans and animals.
