Marlene Dumas
South African National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
Fog of War (2006)
It is well known, so much so that it is now almost an orthodoxy, that Marlene Dumas finds her subjects in newspapers, magazines, and art books; in photographs rather than in the difficult transactional exchange represented by the embodied human sitter. Perhaps it is fitting then that her oeuvre includes so many pictures of the dead. Occasionally prostrated, Dumas’ dead are both generic and specific, at once recalling the nameless humanity of Iraq and the now derelict tropes of painting.
Yet, scattered amongst the many bodies displayed on Dumas’ first solo exhibition in her native South Africa, there is a sampling of cherished subjects, ‘Intimate Relations’ as the title of this overdue survey reminds us. Amongst the close and dear is artist Moshekwa Langa. With characteristic directness, Dumas renders Langa in dark hues and notational brushstrokes, compensating for the near colourlessness of his eyes by adding a purple blemish to his brow, smudges of blue to the surfaces around his mouth and nose. On the packed opening evening a dreamy, elusive Langa stood with his brother, both rapt, each staring at the mercurial portrait looking back at them.
Equally compelling is a portrait of the artist’s grandmother, Martha. Installed at the entrance to the show, which is staged across four rooms and co-curated by the artist, Martha is stolid and distant, a liquid blur of dirty blues and hazy emotion. ‘God cannot be painted,’ writes Dumas of this work in the detailed catalogue accompanying the show. ‘And He isn’t a man. But if He had been a woman, He would have looked like this sometimes.’
Martha: My Ouma (1984)
The receding determinacy of Martha’s image, painted in 1984, recalls Gerhard Richter. The comparison is at once lazy (both work from photographs) and unavoidable. This is notably the case with Dumas’ Fog of War (2006), an uninspiring quartet of expressionist mug shots of the recent war dead. The work, which is complemented by a dull example of Dumas’ usually allusive writing, eerily mimics the abrupt crop of Richter’s triptych Dead (1988), a serial image of Ulrike Meinhof’s dead body – all to far less effect.
Dumas, whose expressionist idiom draws equally on South African (Irma Stern) and international antecedents, feels much less ropey when she disavows the big subjects of the day. She is most confident – and appealing – when she concentrates our looks not on her outrage, which is legitimate, but on the variegated tonalities of human flesh. On its unapologetic nakedness and bruised particularities, on the details of a particular body that has been lived in.
Sean O’Toole
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