Marlene Dumas paints celebrities, nonentities, supermodels, porn models, terrorists, tyrants, dead people, fictional people, children, herself, history’s ghouls and spectres – and Phil Spector, twice capturing the jailed former record producer with and without his fright wig. All succumb to her dissolving, fluid style, as if being carried along a Styx-like river of dark undercurrents.
Across 14 impeccably-installed galleries, Dumas, born in South Africa 61 years ago and based in Amsterdam since the 1970s, shows why, even though she is little known outside the art world, she is the figurative painter-doyenne of our times. Hers is a kind of collective portraiture. Even when she’s doing, say, Naomi Campbell in a white thong, or Ingrid Bergman in tears in ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’, or her five year-old daughter caught red (and blue) handed as ‘The Painter’ (1984), she somehow speaks to all our anxieties and desires.
There’s righteous ire on display in this retrospective. Asked to contribute to a show in St Petersburg in 2014, she responded to Russia’s homophobic laws by painting a roster of gay ‘Great Men’, including, naturally, Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and poet Mikhail Kuzmin. These men are rendered simply in black and white. Dumas’s palette more often tends towards the off-hues of stains and bruises – rained-on concrete, over-ripe fruit – just as the atmosphere of her paintings tends towards ambiguity. She’s brilliant at ennobling the persecuted and oppressed, but then she has a way of turning gods and monsters into mere mortals, too. She’s constantly reminding us of what every picture reveals and conceals.
The weaker paintings are those that give too much away at first glance – like the barriers and graves of her Israel/Palestine-inspired ‘Against the Wall’ series. Dumas doesn’t need to do background detail when she can floor you with a hastily-rendered face. Oddly, for an artist who relies almost exclusively on photographs for source material, her work suffers terribly in reproduction. You really need to see these canvases in the flesh, in all their jaundiced glory.
Martin Coomer