In her triumphant survey exhibition at Palazzo Grassi, Venice, the artist continues her long-running exploration of women as generative, creative forces
Marlene Dumas relishes seepage. Pigment runs into oil and ink into water, bodies melt into one another, sex ebbs into death, people spill out of their assigned categories and bodies flow beyond a picture’s edge. ‘open-end’, the artist’s current solo exhibition at Palazzo Grassi, starts with a jagged slash of raw-looking, blood-red paint against bluish white. This small canvas yields an image with its title: Kissed (2018). Around these hungering mouths, paint leaks from the skin of one face to the other, trickling like bodily fluids.
In the joyous Spring (2017), a towering woman stands with knees bent and pelvis tilted forward, her black dress hitched up and knickers lowered to mid-thigh, dousing her privates in water from a bottle. ‘Spring’ refers to the water source, but also to the fertile, life-giving wetness of the female body. With her cloud of pale brown hair, the figure might be Dumas herself, making a sharp riposte to art historical images of chaste allegorical maidens bearing ewers or strewing blossoms.