In Marlene Dumas’s Miss January (1997), the viewer is confronted by a monumental female figure, three meters tall, naked from the waist down, with powder-white face, deep red lipstick and kohl-smudged eyes. Her bold contrapposto pose, hands on hips and arms akimbo, radiates equal parts nonchalance and defiance, as if daring us to make any assumptions about her. Combining a formal mastery with loose, expressive brushwork, a striking use of color, subtle psychological depth, and a healthy dose of provocation, it is one of the supreme examples of the artist’s work.
When the canvas sold at Christie’s in May this year for $13.63 million (including fees), it set a new auction record for an artwork by a living female artist, confirming Dumas’s status as one of the most important and distinctive painters working today. Almost simultaneously, a new show, “Marlene Dumas: Cycladic Blues” is opening at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens (on show through November 2), offering a timely survey of her remarkable career.
Born in Cape Town in 1953, but based in Amsterdam since the 1970s, Dumas has spent almost five decades fearlessly examining the world around her. She has painted babies and children, the middle-aged and the very old, penises and vulvas, erotic dancers and pornographic models, along with famous artists, writers, celebrities, soldiers, and terrorists. Often politically charged, her work has addressed the racism of the apartheid era, homophobia in Russia, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and much more besides. “There are so many currents throughout her work around ideas of life and death, birth, being human, sex, love, hate; all the emotions you can imagine within the human condition,” said Douglas Fogle, the exhibition’s curator.
In person, Dumas is an amiable presence. Despite saying little at the exhibition’s press conference due to throat trouble (“Yesterday I spoke so much that now my voice is almost gone!” she joked), she politely chatted to admirers afterwards, even submitting to an impromptu book signing in the museum’s lobby. And yet she still remains somewhat mysterious. Her works refuse to offer up any easy answers, their cryptic titles injecting them with layers of nuance which tug obliquely at our senses and emotions. “My art is situated between the pornographic tendency to reveal everything, and the erotic inclination to hide what it’s all about,” she once wrote. And it’s true that her paintings are rarely portraits in the conventional sense, despite frequently depicting people. Works such as Teeth (2018), The White Disease (1985), and Dead Marilyn (2008) are not accurate likenesses of their subjects, but expressions of emotional, psychological, or even physical states of being. Somehow, though, they still invite empathy, however oblique and impenetrable they may seem. “The bodies that she paints are our bodies,” Fogle suggested. “They’re somewhere between our world and the world of the canvas.”
Most of her paintings are based on photographic sources drawn from her extensive archive of polaroids and images clipped from newspapers, magazines, and art books. From Amy Winehouse and Osama Bin Laden, to newborn babies and torture victims, each one is carefully selected, detached from its original context, and set against a more or less neutral background, at times rendering the original source virtually unrecognizable. As Dumas put it in the past, “I deal with second-hand images and first-hand experiences.”
Her creative process involves a strange kind of alchemy. She often pours or tosses paint onto the canvas as a starting point, thinning it with turpentine and shifting it around in fluid, expressive movements, magically conjuring forms with just a few swift brushstrokes. And, despite modestly claiming that “I don’t know much about color really,” she is an extraordinary and highly unconventional colorist. Her palette, which swerves from sickly greens and blues to neon pinks and vibrant reds, via washed-out whites and murky grays, is one of the most distinctive aspects of her works. In The Painter (1994), perhaps her most famous work, a brooding portrait of her daughter Helena is transformed into a raw, almost violent image of the creative process by the vivid splashes of red and black which stain her hands like blood.
Around 40 of the artist’s paintings and drawings (dating from 1992 to the present day) are on display in the Athens show, which is part retrospective, part new work. They are presented alongside the museum’s collection of cycladic figurines, which Dumas has, at times, drawn on in her work. Noting the show’s modest scale, Fogle wryly described it as, “a kind of chamber orchestra version of a survey, rather than a complete symphony.” Dumas herself, now aged 71, called it, “a very intimate… melancholy, meditative exhibition.”
And it’s easy to see why. Quite apart from its allusion to the blues as a state of mournful introspection, the twin specters of aging and mortality haunt the show. Candle (2020), for instance, is a beautifully simple memento mori, verging on abstraction, which echoes the exquisite stillness of Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman. Alfa (2004), by contrast, is based on a newspaper clipping of a young Chechen woman killed in the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis. Her pallid white death mask is infused with a hazy luminescence, blurring her features and transforming the canvas into a universal image of the fate awaiting us all.
The journey towards death, rather than death itself, is the focus of 50+ (2010–18). Painted and repainted over the course of almost a decade with loose, flowing brushstrokes, the end result is a ghostly image of a woman’s face (based on a Roman copy of a Hellenistic sculpture). It seems to hover on the threshold of two states of being, trapped between the last vestiges of youth and the inevitable onset of old age.
The two most recent works on display, Old and Phantom Age (both 2025), show a new side to the artist. They share the monumental dimensions of Miss January, but they couldn’t be more different. These are pale, spectral figures, little more than silhouettes frozen in time on their journey into oblivion.
But mortality isn’t the only theme on display here. As the title of the exhibition suggests, life is a cycle and, for Dumas, aging and death are inextricably intertwined with love, sex, birth, and desire. Leather Boots (2002), a radiant backlit portrait of a nude dancer in Amsterdam, is just one of the many erotic subjects which inhabit her work, while Helena and Eden (2020) is a lovingly observed portrait of the artist’s daughter and young grandson. In Helena (1992), the earliest painting in the exhibition, her daughter appears again, this time as a child. Her intensely focused gaze evokes the fearlessness of youth as she confronts the viewer with an expression of skeptical disdain similar to that seen in The Painter.
For Fogle, however, the one painting in the show which best sums up Dumas’s approach is Immaculate (2003). This small, closely cropped image of a woman’s lower torso, legs open to reveal her genitals, carries obvious echoes of Courbet’s The Origin of The World (1866), addressing creation and the entire cycle of existence in forthright, unapologetic terms. “It’s not about sex as such, it’s about life and the human body,” he said. “It’s the smallest painting in the exhibition, yet the biggest somehow… it’s a whole universe within this very small canvas.”
This ability to balance a sense of mourning and melancholia with a wholehearted embrace of life is one of the defining aspects of Dumas’s oeuvre. “I always think of her work as [being] about life,” Fogle concluded, “And part of life is death.” The artist herself offered the last word on this subject at the press conference, ending with a reading of a poem by the Ancient Greek poet Sappho: “We know this much / Death is an evil; / we have the gods’ / word for it; they too / would die if death / were a good thing.” Though we know death is coming, we resist it anyway, she implied. Dumas, however, will live on: with such an extraordinary body of work, how could she not?
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/YaNOVGR
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