Marlene Dumas Speaks Truth to Power

In Gallery 17 of the Louvre Museum in Paris, there is a carved marble sculpture of a naked elderly man sprawled against a tree, his hands tied at the wrists, his feet barely reaching the ground. His deeply wrinkled face slumps between two stretched, sinewy arms, while his mouth forms a defeated grimace, as though the situation in which he finds himself – bound to a pine trunk – is inevitable. With his eyes downcast, he might already be dead. The Torment of Marsyas, a Roman masterpiece from the second century CE, depicts the mythological satyr who challenged the god Apollo to a musical contest to see who could play their instrument more masterfully and, when he inevitably lost, was flayed alive in a cave for his hubris.

The South African artist Marlene Dumas used a found photograph of this sculpture as the basis for her new painting, Mourning Marsyas (2024). In Dumas’s version, the musician is formed from a viscous column of orangey brown oil paint, which she has poured down a narrow rectangular canvas. There’s no visible tree here, aside from the suggestion of a fragile horizontal blue branch, formed in one gesture, around which Marsyas’s splayed hands are tethered. Delineated in tones of dark blue, purple and grey, three ominous, lurching figures – presumably in mourning, as the title suggests – embrace, crouch alongside and intimately touch the central figure. It’s an unusual picture, even for Dumas.

Over the past 40 years, the artist has transformed found images of violence, mourning and melancholy in paint, inviting us to look unflinchingly at scenes – and faces – of anguish. From close-up portraits of deranged-looking children to victims of torture, her work drags at us, pulls at our senses and emotions, becoming ingrained in our minds like the afterimage of the sun on the inside of our eyelids. These are works that, to borrow the title of a 1993 painting by the artist, present ‘the image as burden’. For Dumas, the story of Marsyas – with his torment, thwarted ambition and cruel demise – contains something prescient to this moment, reflective of a planet in perpetual war. Mourning, she implies, might well be the contemporary condition.

Dumas grew up on her family’s vineyard in Kuils River, a rural area outside Cape Town, and attended Stellenbosch University, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1975. While at Stellenbosch, she was influenced by the political and social dynamics of apartheid-era South Africa, which greatly affected her views on identity and race. In 1976, she moved to the Netherlands to continue her education at De Ateliers in Haarlem, where she was exposed to a broader range of styles and philosophies, as well as works by artists such as Vito Acconci and Joseph Beuys, laying the groundwork for her distinctly emotional painting practice. Drawing played a central role in her life from her earliest years. In the catalogue for her 2014 touring retrospective, also titled ‘The Image as Burden’, she emphasizes, ‘I never had a desire for a camera. I loved to play and draw in the sand.’ Today, still based in Amsterdam, she continues to draw avidly; never, however, as a preliminary to painting, which emerges directly on the canvas in a delicate balance between chance, risk and intentionality.

Dumas’s sources have always been eclectic: from personal Polaroid photographs to snippets from magazines and newspapers. Typically, she pulls from the same material that fascinated her 20th-century predecessors, such as Francis Bacon, who creased, cut up and processed the printed image. However, the uniqueness of Dumas’s hand can be found in the treatment these materials receive once her editorial eye has selected and extracted them from their origins. Eventually, these burdensome images undergo a watery metamorphosis, enriched by unfixed pools of paint that seep into one another, rendering the primary sources wells of evocative suggestion.

Dumas toys with notions of agency over self-image: who has control and who doesn’t.

Redescribing images of violence, suffering, anguish and psychological torture, Dumas understands that impact stems as much from what you omit as what you include. No one escapes her gaze: artists, celebrities, children, dictators, deities, friends, sex workers. What unites these disparate subjects is difficult to define – other than an awareness that many originated in photographs and now they’re less stable, often isolated, hemmed in and sometimes mere shadows.

In her well-known series ‘The First People (I–IV)’ (1990), Dumas depicts four babies lying on their backs, legs splayed. Each takes up almost the entirety of the 1.8-metre canvas on which it is portrayed. Unaware that they’re being painted, the babies’ eyes are vacant and buggy, their heads loose and bobbing. Dumas renders these infants as susceptible, spongey creatures, whose little hands reach out for the world. Her depictions are less an indication of empathy, perhaps, than of a desire to make perceptible the mechanisms and horrors of representation, even at the very beginning of life. Her towering babies are portrayed from above, naked and open to the viewer’s intense scrutiny. Soon, she implies, they will be subject to what Jean-Paul Sartre, in Being and Nothingness (1943), termed ‘the look’: when a consciousness is forced to recognize that it exists not only as the centre of its own being, but also as an object in the world of others. Throughout her work, Dumas toys with notions of agency over self-image: who has control and who doesn’t.

The artist often selects source photographs in which the subject’s agency is somehow compromised, where the very idea of being captured and fixed contains pain or shame: these are people for whom representation is, or has been, a trap. But her choices never seem partial or judgemental, even when the individuals portrayed really ought to be judged. Such is the case with her portraits of disgraced music producer Phil Spector, who she depicted standing trial for the murder of actress Lana Clarkson in 2007. Looking drawn and ghoulish, Spector attended the judicial hearings in a series of increasingly eccentric wigs, his vanity still intact despite the gravity of the circumstances.

Dumas’s wry humour creeps in here. She calls one portrait of Spector in a toupee To Know Him Is To Love Him (2011), the title of his first number-one hit with his group The Teddy Bears in 1958, the lyrics of which were inspired by the inscription on his father’s gravestone. Here, Dumas selects something already peculiar and makes it stranger. Laying the canvas on the floor – in a manner reminiscent of Jackson Pollock or, more precisely, Helen Frankenthaler – she pours her paint staining the surface and creating marks, before retooling and manipulating. The best works render reality more real and raw through stripping away superficialities.

Characters from history, tinged with tragedy or imbued with performativity, are made gluey and paradoxically unmasked by Dumas’s brush. Murky artistic and literary geniuses, such as writer Oscar Wilde and director Pier Paolo Pasolini, appear as autonomous oil paintings (2016 and 2012, respectively) and again as part of the ‘Great Men’ series (2014), a group of ink-wash drawings of gay and bisexual men produced in response to anti-gay legislation in Russia. In the oil works, she synthesizes the men’s complex mythology with the most economical of painterly gestures, inviting us to look again at their familiar faces. A man fond of the shadows, Pasolini is close-cropped by Dumas, his craggy visage appearing to recede into the night, while Wilde wrings his banana-coloured hands and purses his lips.

The artist invites us to peer beyond the received public image of an individual towards their interior world and vulnerabilities, in a bid to unearth their most fundamental emotions, which a photograph might struggle to convey. In addition to painting Pasolini, for instance, she also, somewhat unexpectedly, portrays his mother, Susanna, in Pasolini’s Mother (2012), causing us to reflect upon the origin stories of revered figures. Amy – Blue (2011) affords the late singer Amy Winehouse a dignity she was rarely granted during her short lifetime. A subject for countless vultures keen to profit from her demise, Winehouse is here depicted turning away from the audience, who also wanted ever-more of her, with her pitch-black pupils directed downwards, and her eye makeup swooping towards her undisclosed beehive. Her skin is literally blue.

Characters from history tinged with tragedy are unmasked by Dumas’s brush.

Dumas is a sublime colourist, whose choices lend her works an uncanny sterility. Sometimes, her blacks are deep browns up close, while her blues give way to milky greys. Every one of her surfaces slips. If there’s violence in the precision of painters like Euan Uglow – who tormented his (usually female) sitters with exacting poses that resulted in painfully precise compositions – Dumas finds it in the splashes and slippages.

In Fingers (1999) you see a figure from behind, bent over with her hands between her legs, spreading her labia to the viewer. It’s an image straight from a porn movie or magazine. Yet, with the title, Dumas directs our attention to the fingers, not to the genitals, as you might expect. In doing so, she subtly makes us aware that her attention is on the person, not the purpose for which the image was produced – presumably to get people off. In highlighting the gesture, you become aware of how the picture is constructed: the pulsating vitality of Dumas’s almost-neon palette; the hair, produced from a few whips of majestic purple.

Her ink and chalk drawings – such as The Embrace (2015–16), a delightful monochrome of two figured outlines hugging – channel the aesthetic naiveté of artists like Louise Bourgeois and capture the slapstick curiosity of Bruce Nauman’s neon men (1985), who find places to put parts of one another in one another. Dumas’s drawings explore what the body can do and what bodies together probably will do. This age-old marriage of intercourse and mortality also recalls Roger Hiorns’s series of ‘Sex Paintings’ (2016–ongoing), in which figures very similar to those in Dumas’s Tombstone Lovers (2021) partake in orgiastic acts.

When she approaches violence, it is with a pragmatism that serves only to amplify the suffering. Dead Girl (2002), one of the most overt displays of physical trauma in her canon, contains a profound splat of dark paint surrounding an isolated pale head, a rumination on heavy impact. How do you evoke the energy of violence in paint? I think of the central panel in Bacon’s Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962), in which an eye, liberated from its socket, shoots across the canvas like a flying golf ball. Paint has a way of making photography seem an inadequate conduit.

Dumas looks when others stop. Many artists contend with the visual information pelted at us by contemporary life and media: politicians on lecterns, celebrities at galas and endless, endless suffering. From her earliest works, however, she has toyed with intervening on such material. In Vogue Magazine Model (1973), for instance, she painted over the pages of the titular publication, obliterating the original content – presumably an idealized depiction of an unattainable lifestyle or body.

Her most recent exhibition, also titled ‘Mourning Marsyas’, at Frith Street Gallery in London, contains several canvases in which the legibility present in earlier paintings has all but capitulated. The delicate, spindly bones and inscrutable faces of historical and mythological actors remain. Several of the works, including Fate (2000–24), conjure up moments atmospherically reminiscent of Francisco Goya’s most bizarre settings, such as those  in his series of ‘Black Paintings’ (1819–23). Dumas states in the show’s accompanying text that Goya’s The Fates ‘put a spell on me […] The four sexually ill-defined figures are unsympathetic. They are forces, not human beings.’

Art can confront the strangeness and inequalities of societies and spin them back on themselves.

Dumas’s paintings are anything but unsympathetic. They may be oblique, stark, eclectic, at times impenetrable, but she chooses subjects and scenes – like the globular estimations of figures that gather to mourn Marsyas – which deserve empathy. Art can confront the strangeness and inequalities of societies and spin them back on themselves. Something about her singular treatment enables us to see her subjects for what they are: hurt, frustrated, horny. And, by extension, to see ourselves through them.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 245 with the headline ‘Profile: Marlene Dumas’

Marlene Dumas’s ‘Mourning Marsyas’ is on view at Frith Street Gallery, London, from 20 September – 16 November

^{Main image: Marlene Dumas, ‘Great Men’, 2014–ongoing, ink, pencil and metallic acrylic on paper, 44 × 35 cm. Courtesy: © Marlene Dumas, Studio Dumas and Stedelijk Museum; photograph: Gert Jan van Rooij}