Palazzo Grassi
Marlene Dumas - Open-End
At Palazzo Grassi - Marlene Dumas - Open-End - curated by Caroline Bourgeois
in collaboration with the artist, until January 8 2023 - is the first comprehensive solo
show exposing the work of Dumas in
Italy, as part of the cycle of monographic shows
organised by the Pinault Collection dedicated to
major contemporary artists.
It brings together
over one hundred works from the Pinault
Collection as well as from international museums
and private collections. The focus is on the
artist’s recent work including paintings created
with the Venetian exhibition in mind, and has
been broadened by a selection of paintings and
drawings achieved between 1984 and today.
https://www.palazzograssi.it/it/mostre/in-corso/open-end-marlene-dumas/
“Poetry is writing that breathes and makes jumps and leaves spaces open, so we can read between the lines”
The exhibition unfolds over the two floors of Palazzo Grassi and retraces the founding
themes of Marlene Dumas’ artistic research
through a poetic rhythm, sometimes at a fast
pace, sometimes more slowly, with works of
small dimensions and others very large, as if
the exhibition somehow echoed the artist’s
own definition of poetry: “Poetry is writing that
breathes and makes jumps and leaves spaces
open, so we can read between the lines”.
Kissed - 2018
“I am an artist
who uses second-hand images and first-hand
emotions”.
A crucial aspect of Dumas's work is her use of pre-existing images from which she draws inspiration,
be it images from newspapers, magazines or
films, be it film stills or polaroids she herself has taken. Of her work she says: “I am an artist
who uses second-hand images and first-hand
emotions”. Love and death, gender and race,
innocence and blame, violence and tenderness are among the topics she addresses and through
which the intimate sphere evokes socio-political
aspects, news stories and main topics of art
history.
Awkward - 2018
“I thought a lot about what binds all my
works together, trying to find a title that would also
reflect my state of mind and my perception of the
world around me. I thought about the lockdown,
about being locked and about the museums that are
closed to the public and that Palazzo Grassi will
have to be open to present this exhibition. Then I
thought about the word ‘open’ and about how my
paintings are open to different interpretations. In my
works the viewer immediately sees what I painted
but does not yet know the meaning of it. Where
the work starts is not where it ends. The word
‘end’, which in the context of the pandemic has its
own implications, is both fluid and melancholic”.
Marlene Dumas
A most influential artist on the contemporary art
scene, Marlene Dumas was born in 1953 in Cape
Town, South Africa. She grew up and studied fine
arts during the Apartheid regime. In 1976, she
came to Europe for further studies and settled in Amsterdam, where she still lives and works.
Marlene Dumas today works mainly with oil on
canvas and ink on paper. Her work largely consists
of portraits and human figures, which are universal
representations of the full spectrum of human
emotions.
In Milan you can see Leonardo da
Vinci’s Last Supper, as well as the
sculpture Michelangelo was working
on at the time of his death, the Pietà
Rondanini. Michelangelo wrestled
with this subject, but was unable to
complete it. The sculpture represents
Mother Mary trying to lift the corpse
of her son in order to give him life a
second time. Here we see a grieving
mother in a desperate struggle to
reconcile herself to the loss of her
son.
Homage to Michelangelo - 2012
“Painting is about the trace of the human touch. It is about the skin of a surface. A painting is not a postcard.”
Dumas's work is based on an awareness that the endless flow of images we see daily impacts our perception of ourselves and our ability to read the world. For her, painting is a very physical act, revolving around eroticism and its different histories. Marlene Dumas’ work focuses on the representation of human figures dealing with the most intense emotions and paradoxes: “Painting is about the trace of the human touch. It is about the skin of a surface. A painting is not a postcard.”
The Visitor - 1995
During the 1990s, Dumas created
several large-scale sets of portrait
drawings in grid formations. The models for Betrayal were based
on a wide diversity of photographic
images. Among them are, for
example, gallerists, friends, and even
Nazis. The frog in the drawing refers
to an evil omen, like the frog in the
disturbing Bergman film The Virgin
Spring - 1960.
Betrayal - 1994
"By her very title, Marlene
Dumas expresses her taste for paradox and
melancholy: a priori, the end of something, the
end, in particular of a life, is in itself the opposite
of aperture, open; it is the moment at which
everything is terminated, and closes.
Between these two words that read as one are all the tensions, the irresolutions, the potentials of language poetically evoked by Marlene Dumas, because she is also a poet. As though poetry alone, in painting and in words, could share these possibilities that are life (open) and death (end) at the same time."
Between these two words that read as one are all the tensions, the irresolutions, the potentials of language poetically evoked by Marlene Dumas, because she is also a poet. As though poetry alone, in painting and in words, could share these possibilities that are life (open) and death (end) at the same time."
Caroline Bourgeois
Curator at Pinault Collection
Co-curator of the exhibition - Caroline Bourgeois and Bruno Racine
Director and CEO of Palazzo Grassi
The Particularity of Nakedness is a
horizontal nude portrait of Dumas’
lover at the time, and later life partner,
and father of her daughter, the painter
Jan Andriesse - 1950-2021. The figure was composed by
joining together different Polaroid
photographs that Dumas had taken
in her studio, which accounts for the unnatural perspective of the pose.
The Particularity of Nakedness - 1987
The Painter brings together Dumas’
principal themes: the portrait, the
nude, and her chosen medium –
painting. We see an image of a young
girl, which we might read variously
as vulnerable and strong, innocent
and hostile. Her hands are coated
with deep red and dark blue paint;
her naked belly is light blue. Larger
than life, she confronts us with a
piercing gaze. In Birth his larger-than-life image of a
naked, pregnant woman was born
out of Dumas’ endeavor to create
a different type of Venus. Trawling
through art history Dumas used
various models and muses and made
them her own. At the time this painting was made,
Marlene’s daughter Helena was
pregnant. She gave birth to her son
Eden on the day of the opening
of Marlene’s exhibition Myths and
Mortals, where Birth was shown for the first time.
The Painter - 1994 - Birth - 2018
"I have painted more women than men I paint women for men I paint women for women I paint the women of my men"
Marlene Dumas
1997
Dora Maar - The Woman Who saw Picasso cry - 2008
"Paintings tell stories.
As zombies walk the earth,
I moved slowly from
the faces to the bodies.
From the eyes to the skin.
From the word to the flesh."
Marlene Dumas
1989
Alien - 2017 - Spring - 2017 - Amazon - 2016
Bride is both a vertical field of painted
lines, edged in with dark sides that
hint at an Egyptian mummy in her
coffin or a widow without a groom.
Bride - 2018
Eye is painted with rough brushstrokes and fluid, dripping paint, this picture of a
single staring eye seems unfinished.
The extreme cinematographic closeup recalls the surrealist horror scene
from the 1929 movie Un Chien
Andalou by Luis Bunuel and Salvador
Dali. After that, no image of an eye
feels safe anymore, even though
the model for this painting was a
“harmless" cosmetic advertisement for
mascara.
Eyes are often called mirrors of the
soul, but take care to protect yourself
from the gaze of the evil eye.
Eye - 2018
"I situate art not in reality but in
relation to desire."
Marlene Dumas
1983
The Hierarchy painting from 1992 was based
on a still from the 1976 French-Japanese movie In the Realm
of the Senses, a very sensual,
controversial film about sexual
obsession, with a fatal ending,
directed by Nagasi Oshima
Hierarchy - 1992
Dumas produced two series of works
on paper, which were intended as
illustrations for the Dutch translation
of William Shakespeare’s poem
Venus and Adonis - 1593 - by Hafid
Bouazza in 2016. Shakespeare’s story
drew on Ovid’s mythological poem
Metamorphoses.
Venus and Adonis I - 2015-2016
Kissing - as a verb
Kissing - 2018
Scent of a Flower is inspired by her work on the two
Venus and Adonis series.
Dumas followed them with a number
of intimately-scaled canvases that
focus on details of various parts of
the body and face, which the artist
refers to as “erotic landscapes." These
works relate closely to Shakespeare’s
extensive writings about the five
senses in which he describes how
the state of being in love affects a
person.
Scent of a Flower - 2018
"Homage to the Polaroid The only camera I ever liked and used was the Polaroid camera. The Polaroid, always and only, true to its own sublime distorted nature. Fast and fickle and hands-on physical, indifferent to digital vanity. Cheap and expensive at the same time. No copy and no negative."
Marlene Dumas
2008
The Occult Revival - 1984
The work is a collaboration between
Marlene Dumas and her daughter
Helena then aged five. Helena
decorated, improved, and worked
with color as if applying make-up
on Dumas’ black and white ink wash
drawings of female faces which she
found boring. It was her underground.
It was not set up as an art project
but it was the child’s subversion of
her mother’s work that led to this
series.
Helena enjoyed working over the drawings, which until then had never been allowed to touch.
Underground - 1994-1995
Marlene Dumas in collaboration with her daughter - Helena
Green Lips - Monica - L. - Mama as Belly Dancer - 1996
Marlene Dumas in collaboration with her daughter - Helena
Helena
The Ritual - with Doll - 1992
"Painting as a shadow play Painting as a gesture The making of a move towards Painting is about something that isn't there."
Marlene Dumas
The Origin of Painting - The Double Room - 2018 - Time and Chimera - 2020 The Making of - 2020
The inspiration for this work was a
tombstone for a husband and wife
from 1474, located in the Pieterskerk
in the Dutch city of Leiden. The
stone was embedded in the floor of
the old church, where, for centuries,
congregants and visitors walked over
it. The seemingly naked couple stand
with their hands crossed over their
genitalia. Their sexuality has been
deleted by time.
Dumas painted the Tombstone Lovers
in a desperate moment of impatience
against the ticking of the clock, while trying to gasp the notion of eternity.
Tombstone Lovers - 2021
De acteur - Portrait of Romana Vrede - The Actor - 2019
Io - 2008
"On Words and Images I can see why many visual artists dislike words in artworks. They feel that words dirty the clear water that has to reflect the sky. It disturbs the pleasure of the silent image, the freedom from history, the beauty of nameless forms. I want to name our pains. I want to keep on changing our names."
Marlene Dumas
1984
Great Men - series of drawings - 2014-present - detail
Dumas painted Wilde not as the
proud and popular author he used to
be but as the mournful and vulnerable
man he became in relation to the
young lover who led to his tragic end.
Oscar Wilde - 2016
Groupshow depicts a row of naked
women from the back, all looking in
the same direction over a fence at
something that we cannot see. It was
based on a photograph in a nudist
magazine from the 1960s. Dumas
removed it from its original context
and turned it into a conceptual work
as a commentary on art, or more
specifically, a humors commentary
on group shows in general.
Groupshow - 1993
Blindfolded - 2002
"When my mother was alive I never painted flowers for her. After her death, in 2007, I tried to paint the flowers on her grave. I wanted to paint a portrait of her without painting her. I was trying to paint something that had no end."
Marlene Dumas
2021
Einder - Horizon - 2007-2008
The title comes from an Afrikaans
poem by Elizabeth Eybers, in which
the word “einder" suggests both “the
end”, and a horizon one cannot reach.