Marlene Dumas
In 1976, Dumas first watched a pornographic film. The film, Deep Throat – screened in an Amsterdam cinema – proved pivotal in her painterly considerations. “My art,” she suggests, “is situated between the pornographic tendency to reveal everything and the erotic inclination to hide what it is all about.” Her paintings persist in this figurative tension, her brush at once describing and obscuring her subjects. To this, Stripper suggests rather than shows an undressed figure, her body washes of pink pigment, back arched, breasts barely legible, face reduced to violet shadows. Secrets, Dumas believes, are compelling; the artist returning those figures given to be seen – sex workers and celebrities – into more sensuous anonymity. To show or not to show? To what degree, in what manner? Such are the questions that guide her practice. Of the series of stripper paintings she produced in the late 90s, this work among them, she recalls: "It was not the nude I was looking for, nor the posing figure, but the erotic conditions of life.”
b.1953, Cape Town
“She is an iconoclast with a love of images and tradition,” the artist and academic Virginia MacKenny wrote of Marlene Dumas, “a painter who degrades paint beyond its capacity.” Working her medium to its limits, her pigment awash in turpentine, Dumas resists the lustre of oil paint. From the saturated images of her early work, time appears to have leached the colour from her brush. The paint, growing greyer and more ghostly, is applied in ever-thinner washes. The artist continues to paint bodies, both living and dead, working from images found, taken, and borrowed. Unconcerned with verisimilitude, Dumas’ paintings are less a study in likeness than reflections on the mutability of the human experience. Fluid and gestural, Dumas’ images have about them a spectral quality. Many are unsettling, all uncertain; a strange confluence of the sensual and foreboding.