A wall of faces greets you in the opening room. Dozens of ink and graphite images look back at us, wonky and misproportioned, but also weirdly right. They’re called Rejects – do their sometimes wild imperfections signal failure, or something else? This is a good way to begin. Should we reject them, too? The series is ongoing, and Marlene Dumaskeeps them close – a family full of flaws. It’s their faults that make them human.
There are faces everywhere in these rooms of sex and death. Even when she is painting the dead, Dumas’s work is full of life. Near the end of Tate Modern’s Dumas retrospective are her large, oil-painted heads of Saint Lucy, leftwing German militant Ulrike Meinhof and an anonymous young woman shot by Russia’s Alpha anti-terrorism forces in the 2002 Dubrovka theatre siege in Moscow. The heads remind me of sexual rapture as much as death. I wrote about these paintings 10 years ago, and they’re even more alive to me now.
Born in South Africa, Dumas deals in the paradoxes and ambiguities of both painting and life. Who knows, when they begin a painting, how things will end up? If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. Among these heads is a picture of the skull of Charlotte Corday, who murdered the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat in his bath. It’s like a cratered moon. Corday went to the guillotine “without rage”, Dumas observes.