MARLENE DUMAS: WORKS ON PAPER AND PAINTINGS
The faces show a wide range of age, race, and expressivity, the beautiful and sensual set alongside the plain and elderly. But their placement is also eerie, as if this were a photo arrangement of missing persons, family snapshots used to identify crime victims. By titling the piece Female and placing the images as she does, Dumas slyly indicts our culture, which makes women anonymous and betrays their histories by ignoring them: Dumas seems to see women of different circumstances and races melting into a plethora of forgotten beings. But given the sheer number of images, they begin to seem the reality of womanhood, which is implicitly juxtaposed with the myth of the fantasized woman.
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A layered portrait emerges from Dumas’ work as a whole, as if from the ashes of cultural stereotyping. Her critique of fairy tales is particularly harsh. One of her larger oils, Snow White in the Wrong Story, places a naked woman inside a glass case. The painting recalls the Disney image of the passive beauty Snow White lying in a drugged sleep, waiting to be awakened, but this captive woman’s anguished face challenges the myth that women want to be passive.
