They don’t get much bigger in the painting world than South African–born, Amsterdam-based Marlene Dumas, known for decades for her quasi-Expressionistic, washy Impressionistic, blurry photo-based paintings of troubled hot spots, naked babies, dead bodies, women mourning in cemeteries, armed soldiers, sex, terrorism — and who, in some way, created my social-media persona. One day in the early 2000s, bored with posting my status on Facebook as “Working” or “Getting ready to go on a trip,” and fresh from seeing a Dumas show, I wrote something to the effect that I found Dumas’s use of the photo, her painting style, and her opportunistic subject matter not to my liking — and said so (people went bonkers against me). Even though Dumas’s work still strikes me as repetitive, in this show she has upped the ante with what seem like more personal pictures of her daughter, pregnancy, women’s bodies, and something sexier than ever before — more honestly abject, closer to a human coil.

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Vulture, article by Jerry Saltz