A month earlier than the Cecilia Alemani Biennale, built around the female artists who have left their mark on the definition of the contemporary, Venice welcomes the first major solo exhibition in Italy of Marlene Dumas (born in 1953), a South African painter who today it is one of the most important and influential in the world.
At Palazzo Grassi it is open open-end, an exhibition with over one hundred works from the Pinault collection, but also from international museums and private collections, which offers a very broad overview of Dumas’ work and is a candidate to be one of the exhibitions of the year. Venice, between Biennials and collective exhibitions, is the place in our country that has been most attentive to the career of the Cape Town painter and Palazzo Grassi, with its structure and its light, is a space capable of underlining the ambivalent nature of Dumas’s paintings and give each painting the right emphasis and the right contextualization.
Caroline Bourgeois, curator of the exhibition, considers her an artist who “takes risks more than anyone else”, and they are risks that concern “the themes, the subjects, the way of painting and even the colors”. But, and this is the fundamental point around which the whole exhibition is built, Marlene Dumas, in addition to her, takes care of her own painting and above all of what is depicted in it.
This attitude, which is part of his artistic practice, completely changes the perception of the paintings, and perhaps even their deeper meaning. Because if it is true that these are works that arise from “second-hand” images, such as newspaper photographs or film and Polaroid frames taken by the artist herself, it is also indubitable that the sensations that reach the public are “first-rate ”, To use Dumas’ words.
The subjects of the paintings can be difficult, drawn from pornography or current events, such as Turkish girl of 1999 that flaunts the genitals or the Blindfolded 2002, based on the image of a young Palestinian arrested in a refugee camp. In both cases, what is striking is the way in which the subject is pictorially constructed: what really matters are the colors and brushstrokes that define the characters.
Only at that point, on the solidly figurative basis of Marlene Dumas’ painting, the political and social aspects are grafted, which are obviously crucial, but which alone are not enough to explain the urgency of her work.
Another important theme to approach the exhibition and the artist is that of color. Key element in imposing painting like Time and Chimera, where the female figure shines with a pure golden light, the color in Dumas can however also be dirty, contaminated, sometimes the result of chance. Because her painting is often gestural and has many performative elements that give it a share of imponderability, in which – as happens for example with the surrealist artists who will be one of the cornerstones of the future Biennale – the greatest magic of her Work.
The extent of Dumas’s paintings is measured precisely where even she cannot get to exercise her authorial control. This is the case with the Occult Revivala juxtaposition of two magnificent portraits of Dumas herself and a lover, whose fascination derives from elements that are outside the perimeter of the painting: for example the gazes of the two figures and the dark background, the black that the painter uses as an element of affirmation and not negation or absence.
On display you can also meet a mighty Amazon from behind, inspired by the artist’s daughter, but also the screen of an iPhone, very black while two hands are using it: there are the faces of great men and the disturbing portrait of the brother from child. But above all there is the coherence of a pictorial style that is constantly updated while remaining itself.