Marlene Dumas

Dumas’s portrait Jen hovers between love and death. The painting depicts the head and chest of a prone, naked woman; her eyes are shut and her skin seems drained of color, except for touches of unnatural peach and green around her face and swaths of blue on her lips and eyelid. Against this ashen pallor, a strangely swollen pink-and-blood-red nipple appears to protrude from the canvas. Drastically foreshortened and closely cropped, the figure recalls Renaissance depictions of the dead Christ as much as the art-historical tradition of supine female nudes. It is hard to tell whether she is sleeping or lifeless.

The picture is in fact part of a harrowing series of portraits of corpses, but in this case Dumas borrowed the source image for Jen from a reproduction of a still from Yoko Ono’s 1970 film Fly, in which houseflies crawl over the body of a recumbent, slowly breathing actress. Dumas’s female figure thus traverses still and moving image, vitality and objecthood, arousal and burial.

Born in South Africa in 1953, Dumas has lived and worked in the Netherlands since 1976. She has painted people in vastly different places and states—whether being rounded up by police, or lost in thought, or tenderly embracing. She has said, “I want to portray people in all their complexity and never [as a] completely definable entity.”