Marlene Dumas

Jack Tilton/Anna Kustera Gallery, New York
Through July 7

Through the ebbs and flows of contemporary art’s passion for painting, Marlene Dumas has kept the faith. Her first solo exhibition in New York in seven years finds her work better than ever. As she has shown in the past, Dumas is not afraid of the grand gesture, relishing the opportunity to present considerations of universal, though highly personal, concerns in her paintings.

Dumas marries these concerns with expressionist paintings that wryly comment on the personal as much as the political. Examining the relationships between art, love, and war, All is Fair in Love and War is a testament to the power of painting as material image in a world where the cold screens of Microsoft’s windows rule.

The seventeen paintings on view, mostly from the last two years, are vertically composed portraits of full figured nudes. While evocative of the complexity of human relationships and history, especially denoted by her titles— The End of Christianity, Cultural Difference, and so on— Dumas’ works are also out and out sexy. While not quite as pornographic as her earlier works, Stella, The Taboo, and Aurora are erotically charged by Dumas’ expressionist paint handling, painterly emotion, and the gaze forced by the tight formal composition.

The figure is usually placed at the center of the vertical’s confined space, where voluptuous limbs hold bodies that recall the sumptuous female figures of Matisse’s reclining nudes. While Dumas delights in the erotic strength of the female body, The Woman of Algiers, suggests the recognition of the violence put upon it by men. Two cage bars are thickly impastoed across the figure as if jailed. Women can, however, be the orchestrators of violence, as in The Taboo, where a woman holds a weapon in front of her nude body and in Against History, a picture after Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat, who was murdered by Charlotte Corday.

In Dumas’ lyrical paintings, love and war are driven out of our heads, consuming us in a “light” the way that only true love can. The pleasure and complexity of looking at paintings can be like this, as Dumas has written, “art, like an occult situation, is an ancient ritual, as dangerous as the first flare of attraction between two people.”




Franklin Sirmans