"I paint because I am a dirty woman.” Everything that is radical and enjoyable about Marlene Dumas’ art, as well as its limitations, is implied in that statement.
Tate Modern’s new retrospective celebrates Dumas’ significant, distinctive contribution to contemporary figuration: the sensuality yet restraint of her washed textures of thinned, translucent paint; the smudgy, ugly hues, often suggesting bruised flesh, and the political play with colour; a confrontational approach to the female form, in which the cropped figure asserts itself in dramatic close-up on a neutral ground.
Unafraid of sources as provocative as porn magazines or sensational news reportage, Dumas challenges centuries of the male gaze. The traditional nude is reprised in “Fingers” with a woman on all fours absorbed in her own pleasure, pale buttocks thrust towards the viewer, livid purple fingers between legs. The female body in “Woman of Algiers”, a title referencing Delacroix and Picasso, and in “The Trophy”, is politicised: a naked prisoner is held up, as if for exhibition, by two police officers. Imitating the censorship of the original newspaper shot published in 1960 during the Algerian war, Dumas blocks out breasts and genitals with slabs of black paint — metaphor for history’s silenced voices.