There is a painting in this show of the man who murdered the Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh, shooting him repeatedly before slashing his throat. It is delicate and pale, materialising in beautiful veils. There is another of Osama bin Laden in the glowing stained-glass hues of a Rouault. Should they be quite so gorgeous, these canvases? Should these men get such lavish treatment? Who should appear in a painting?
The art of Marlene Dumas, born in South Africa in 1953, is painterly and provocative in about equal measure. You notice the method – fluent, sumptuous, the paint sinking into the canvas in translucent stains, the brush carrying its licks and swipes with gliding expertise – at exactly the same moment as the subject, which is always human, often vulnerable, violent, suffering or dead. That’s the first disjuncture, a sort of double take that forces the viewer to think twice about why the subject has been painted in this way. The second question is more primitive: simply, who’s in this painting and why?
Dumas has been painting lone heads – and occasionally bodies, naked – for more than 30 years. The isolating focus gives a certain grandeur to each image. A damaged face floats in black watercolour on white paper, puckering the surface so that the pain seems redoubled. A heavy head thickens around the eyes, which hold a strange light, particularly in the self-portraits, so often her strongest works.