Exceptional Works: Marlene Dumas

Lost, 2015–2017

Oil on canvas 78 3/4 x 39 3/8 inches 200 x 100 cm

Marlene Dumas’s work drags at us, pulls at our senses and emotions, becoming ingrained in our minds like the afterimage of the sun on the inside of our eyelids. These are works that, to borrow the title of a 1993 painting by the artist, present ‘the image as burden’.... Eventually, these burdensome images undergo a watery metamorphosis, enriched by unfixed pools of paint that seep into one another, rendering the primary sources wells of evocative suggestion.”

Sean Burns, art critic, 2024

Lost (2015–2017) is a haunting portrait rendered in nuanced hues, ranging from pale blue and lavender to deep browns and indigo. Gestural, fluid, and spectral, the painting depicts girls who were abducted from Chibok, Nigeria, by the Islamist group Boko Haram in 2014. The case caused global outcry and continues to unfold ten years on with the campaign to #BringBackOurGirls. While a number of the victims have escaped or been released, more than 100 remain missing.

In subject and in form, Lost is a powerful example of Dumas’s figurative work based on images taken from a variety of sources, from art-historical materials to mass media and snapshots of friends and family. Dumas reframes and recontextualizes her subjects, exploring the shifting boundaries between public and private selves.

A still from footage of girls abducted by Boko Haram in 2014

Vehemently opposed to Western education, the militant group Boko Haram attacked the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok in April 2014, kidnapping an estimated 276 students. Arranged in rows and depicted in headscarves and long robes, the girls appear in Dumas’s painting as they have in a number of videos released over the years by Boko Haram. Dumas’s subtle handling of paint and color allows many of the girls to retain a compelling individuality despite their confinement.

“Over the past 40 years,” Sean Burns writes, Dumas “has transformed found images of violence, mourning and melancholy in paint, inviting us to look unflinchingly at scenes—and faces—of anguish.” 

Marlene Dumas, Lost, 2015–2017 (detail)

Dumas frequently depicts groups of individuals in her work, exploring the interrelation between her subjects, her painterly media, and the viewer. Lost features a stacked, vertical composition familiar from major works by the artist such as Angels in Uniform (2012). Dumas, who grew up in South Africa during the apartheid era and has expressed her own discomfort at being part of a group, has long engaged with the tension between people as individuals and the category to which they may have been assigned.

Lost also shows the influence of Edvard Munch on Dumas's painting. In the work of both artists, the arrangement of a group of figures often verges on the abstract, melding multiple identities and forms almost into a single, ambiguous body. In Dumas’s case, this invariably appears against a featureless backdrop.

“In … a group portrait [by Dumas],“ the writer and scholar Ernst van Alphen explains, “our eyes move from one face to another. For groups are always composed, that is they have a centre, a foreground, a background, margins. They create outsiders and insiders.”

Marlene Dumas, Angels in Uniform, 2012. Pinault Collection

Edvard Munch, Evening on Karl Johan, 1892. KODE Art Museum, Bergen, Norway

“I wanted to be a modern painter. The need to get rid of the background, making it as flat as possible, became very important. So I ended up with all these isolated figures, or, in the case of a group … one body.”

—Marlene Dumas

Marlene Dumas, Lost, 2015–2017 (detail)

“To paint is an apology for painting.... My works are heavy with the weight of a bad conscience, deceased loves, past failures and present atrocities.”

 

Marlene Dumas, 2024

Marlene Dumas in her studio, 2014. Photo by Jackie Nickerson

Art Basel Paris