Marlene Dumas, Waiting (for Meaning) (1988), courtesy The Museum of Modern Art |
Marlene Dumas seems a chummy sort. At the press preview for “Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave,” a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, she ingratiated herself to sundry journalists and critics. Standing at the podium, Dumas thanked museum personnel, not least of all, the exhibition organizer Cornelia Butler, and referred to MOMA Director Glenn Lowry not by name, but as “the museum guy.” The crowd laughed. Dumas’s lack of pretension was refreshing.
Which proves how wide the gulf between artist and art can be. There’s nothing chummy or unpretentious about Dumas’s paintings and drawings. They’re dour, ghostly, and self-conscious. Dry and silvery black dominates her palette. Her touch is wispy and the surfaces diaphanous, but the pictures are burdened by gravity all the same. Dumas’s stock of images adds thematic heaviness: bloodied corpses, executions, sex workers, and Snow White, clammy and naked, being ogled by the seven dwarfs. This is dank, in-your-face stuff.
Dumas was born in South Africa in 1953. After graduating from the University of Capetown, she immigrated to Amsterdam and continued her studies in art. After dabbling in Conceptualism, Dumas turned to painting in the early 1980s, emboldened by the Neo-Expressionists and, it would seem, the insouciant and stylish paintings of Francesco Clemente. Dumas subsequently gained renown, more in Europe than in the United States, for stark