Marlene Dumas

Gallery Koyanagi, Tokyo
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Tokyo, Museum of Contemporary Art; Marugame, Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Marlene Dumas: Broken White, 2007-2008

Ilaria Bonnacossa, Dominic van den Boogerd, Mariussia Casadio and Barbara Bloom, Marlene Dumas, London 2009, p. 140, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is warmer in the original. The catalogue illustration fails to fully convey the iridescent quality of the paint apparent in the original. Condition: The work is in very good condition. The sheet it attached to the backing mount at intervals on the reverse. The horizontal edges are deckled and there are artist’s pin holes in all four corners.
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"The aim of my work has always been to arouse in my audience (as well as in myself) an experience of empathy with my subject matter."

Marlene Dumas, My Best Works, 1985

 

"For me watercolours used to be associated with failed artist (eg Hitler), retired politicians (eg Churchill) and Sunday painters. It was the most uncritical, non-aggressive asexual thing to do. Then its image changed. Now everyone is doing it. Falling for this seductive, addictive medium, it's hard to stop. Every little blob begs to be loved.  So I try to raise the stakes. Increase resistance. Unlike most painters, my watercolours are bigger than my paintings."

Marlene Dumas in: Thomas Knubben and Tilman Osterwold, eds., Marlene Dumas: Wet Dreams: Watercolours, 2003, p.78

 

 

Young Boy (Hang Up) and Young Boy (Baby Face) are two mesmerising large-scale works on paper which embody Marlene Dumas' unique and celebrated approach to painting. Executed in inky diluted watercolour, both works depict the semi-naked, exposed figures of two young boys, isolated on narrow sheets of paper in three-quarter length poses, hands concealed behind their backs. Deliberately sexually ambiguous, the figures appear of almost indeterminate gender: the curving waist and hip of Young Boy (Hang Up) is suggestive of female contours, with darkly smeared genitals between his legs. The juvenile innocence of Young Boy (Baby Face) is implied by the title, which makes explicit reference to the beauty of adolescence. The poses of the subjects, reminiscent of Dégas' La Petite Danseuse, show Dumas' adaptation of art historical precedent, using established aesthetic devices to create two art works of exceptional power and intrigue. The pooled, watery swathes of pigment in a bruised palette of blacks, blues and greys create an atmosphere of shadowy voyeurism, infused with the implication of mysterious taboo, layered ambiguity and narrative opacity. 

 

Dumas is often described as an 'intellectual expressionist', blurring the boundaries between painting and drawing. In both of the present works, bold lines and shapes mix seamlessly with ephemeral washes and thick, gestural brushwork. Dense strokes of black and blue structure the hair and features of Young Boy (Hang Up), his mouth a gaping orifice of smudged pigment and his single exposed eye a black recessed hole, while the semi-translucent washes of Young Boy (Baby Face) articulate a childish body, the lightness of the medium heightening the unsettling sense of an illicit gaze. By simplifying and distorting the features of her subjects, Dumas creates intimacy through alienation.  Akin to other provocative paintings and drawings of men, women and children, Young Boy (Hang Up) and Young Boy (Baby Face) are as psychologically challenging as they are strikingly beautiful. Consistently choosing to work from photographs rather than live models, Dumas gathers source images from fashion magazines, newspapers, pornography and other found images, including film archives and the photographs she takes herself. Her characters are firmly rooted in the current, contemporary world, inhabiting a very different space from any nineteenth or twentieth century precedent. Dumas revels in finding images and quotes from wherever and whomever she wishes – her visual and linguistic vocabularies cobble together slightly skewed aphorisms form popular and art historical imagery: fashion models, vintage movies, Manet's Olympia and Naomi Campbell. Through the reductive process of paring down a source photograph, Dumas strips the image from any original context, twisting the familiar so that it becomes structurally undone.

 

With Young Boy (Hang Up) and Young Boy (Baby Face), the celebrated corpus of ballerina pastels, paintings and sculptures by Edgar Dégas looms large. La Petite Danseuse, executed in 1871-81 was aged just fourteen: Dégas' fascination with the young, female form ran to obsession, his depictions of nubile dancers in fin-de-siècle music halls revealing a world of dubious relations between young dancers and their voyeuristic male admirers. In the present works on paper, Dumas' appropriates the compositional vocabulary of Dégas, but inverts its meaning: the young female ballerina, dancing for male gratification, has been transformed into two young boys with blank stares, exposed, vulnerable and starkly presented for the viewer. For Dumas, no subject is sacred: contradicting the sentimental, her depictions of adults and children are often ambivalent and depict the parasitic nature of humankind. She takes on subjects that are considered taboo, undermining universally held belief systems, and corrupts the very way images are negotiated. The present two works are each elusive paintings on paper which reveal more than they display: provocative, disturbing and offering no moral solace, they illuminate Dumas' extraordinary and crucial contribution to contemporary painting and feminist discourse.