A treatise on gender, sexuality, voyeurism and agency, Marlene Dumas' Handy distills the artist's most essential conceptual aims into an intimate yet powerful canvas. Emerging from the darkness, the subject of the present work exposes their genitals while gazing toward the viewer, a phosphorescent blur of pinks and crimsons seemingly illuminated by a camera's flash. Handy presents an unfixed vision, one which makes ambiguous questions of control, performance, subjugation and empowerment. Delineated with a masterful economy of means, Handy speaks to a documentary basis while transcending the objective nature of the genre, culminating in a canvas that finds broad political, social and aesthetic significance in depicting the individual.

Raised in apartheid-era South Africa, Marlene Dumas has lived and worked in the Netherlands for the past four decades, devoting her practice to addressing the core dichotomies undergirding the contemporary age. Using the human body to address notions of sexuality, race and moral alignment, Dumas most celebrated paintings implicate their viewer and, by proxy, society in an exchange contingent on received notions of good and evil as well as beauty and ugliness. Among the pantheon of Dumas' most affecting works, Handy removes the veneer of respectability from the genre of the nude, imbuing it with confrontation and unease. Sourced from pornography, the artist recontextualizes her subject through a binary process of revealing and obfuscation, a visual approach that "is suggestive; it suggests all sorts of narratives, but it doesn't really tell you what's going on at all" (the artist in conversation with Barbara Bloom in Dominic van den Boogerd, Barbara Bloom and Mariuccia Casadio, Eds., Marlene Dumas, New York 1999, p. 12). While Dumas' subject purports to bear it all, her identity is softened and obscured, allowing Handy to move beyond individual concerns into the social and emotional realm.

A master colorist, Dumas' varied formal choices in Handy, including her heightened and tonal palette, are as crucial as her subject. Without a specific place or context, the sitter's form is hewn from her dark surroundings, which thinly veil a blushy red and pink underpainting matching the coloration of the sitter's body. Delineated with brushy vigor, Dumas' subject suggests both naturalism and caricature, communicating a visual identity that is both generic and specific. Evoking the placelessness of art historical antecedents within the tradition of the nude, including Gustave Courbet's L'Origine du Monde, Handy is a reorientation of the idiom, zooming out on a familiar scene to make clear the choices implicit in the act of painting.

A reclamation of the female form within a tradition of nudes, Handy's subject is confined to the picture plane, simultaneously revealing multiple facets of her body and face through perspectival foreshortening and bodily contortion. Dumas engages her capacity to shock and unsettle through painterly frankness, utilizing overt sexuality and societal conceptions of vulgarity to implicate the art viewing public in the conditions of her imagery. Describing the effect of works like Handy, Ilaria Bonacossa writes, "these works are more than the stereotypes of pornography; they make us uncomfortable because they represent the visual compromise of how we negotiate ourselves as sexual animals and intellectual human beings" (Ilaria Bonacossa, "Further than 'I' can see," in: Marlene Dumas, London 2009, p. 169). In Handy, Dumas' subject is both objectified and a subjective force, defying conventions reinforced through centuries of art history, meeting the male gaze and gazing back, ultimately subverting it.