“Painting is about the trace of the human touch. It is about the skin of a surface. A painting is not a postcard.”
Coruscating rivers of blue, black and yellow pigments pool together to form the wall of bodies that constitute Marlene Dumas’ monumental painting, Love your Neighbor. One of the most influential artists in the arena of contemporary figurative painting, Dumas executed the present work in 1994, the year apartheid officially came to an end in her native South Africa and the year prior to her landmark inclusion in the Venice Biennale. With its title referencing the ubiquitous verse from the Bible, the present work advances Dumas’ celebrated meditations on the power of nudity and painting’s role in collective memory, here addressing the most essential human rights with simultaneously personal and political valences. Showcasing Dumas’ command of her chosen medium and nuanced modulations of color, Love your Neighbor probes the politics of love, race and the body and illuminates the turbulence of being, begging the viewer to consider the inequity we witness daily and offering a resolution. It is her courage, candor and indisputable technical proficiency that have earned Dumas the honor of several international traveling retrospectives at some of the world’s most prominent museums, and her work is held in such esteemed institutional collections as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate Collection, London; the Fondation Beyeler, Basel and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, among many others. Leading the pantheon of Dumas’ most affecting output, Love your Neighbor posits congregation, nudity and, ultimately, empathy as the greatest equalizers: an operatic ode to our capacity to serve not only as subjects of history but authors of it.
Born in 1953 in Cape Town, Dumas moved to Amsterdam in 1976 while apartheid legislation was still in place. In 1993, however, a new constitution was adopted, ending over four decades of laws that governed whether and where the non-white majority could live, work, study and vote, even restricting with whom they could associate. Nelson Mandela was inaugurated the first democratically-elected president the year prior, marking the end to institutionalized racial segregation, and it was this critical juncture in Dumas’ home country’s history that inspired a small but powerful series of panoramic group portraits. In the present work, sixteen figures, arranged in pairs, populate the picture plane. Unlike other single-sitter portraits by the artist, there is no dramatic perspectival foreshortening or acrobatic bodily contortion – the figures stand at ease, arms slung around one another’s shoulders and waists. The architectonic arrangement of bodies in the present work forms a kind of barricade or facade, an idea Dumas would revisit and literalize in later paintings.
Delicately articulated in brushy, confident strokes of oil, their flesh ranges every tone of gray, spiked with underpainted layers of teal, mustard and ochre that seep into the weave of the canvas and into one another. The skin of their bodies emanate a metameric, chromatic glow, bruised by a history of disenfranchisement and dispossession, and the composition, suffused with spectral, opalescent flesh, is frank in its presentation of nudity. In a further departure from her other works, which boast such declarative subjects as sex workers, prisoners and corpses, there is an anonymity to these models of unassignable identity. Her visual vocabulary in terms of color and composition may stay consistent with other examples of her portraiture, but the present work offers a rare glimpse into the shift away from the confrontational or plainly sexual. In fact, though the subjects of the present work purport to bare it all in their unflinching nakedness, the viewer’s position behind the figures prevents additional recognition – a strategy the artist frequently employs. Dumas alternates between exposure and obfuscation, generosity and withholding, to tap not only into the concerns of the individual but broader social and emotional realms.
Marlene Dumas’ 1993-94 Tableau Figure Paintings
“My art is situated between the pornographic tendency to reveal everything and the erotic inclination to hide what it's all about."
Here, the primacy of nudity invokes a centuries-long legacy of art historical antecedents. From the Three Graces to Venus, Cezanne’s Bathers to Picasso’s Desmoiselles, Love your Neighbor joins an expansive conversation on the portrayal of the naked body in the canon, probing in its process the question of whose bodies are deemed worth painting, studying and remembering. Dumas eschews historic standards of beauty in the present work and strikes idealization from its surface. The subjects of Love your Neighbor, particularly the female subjects, are not made into sites for consumption, thus we recognize the group’s stance from behind as protectionary: Dumas has shielded them from expectation, perception and demands of perfection and submission. Dumas’ relationship to the body, at least those pictured in the present work, is wholly unlike that of her contemporaries. Unlike Lucian Freud, Love your Neighbor’s depiction of nudity contains no lust or disgust; unlike Jenny Saville, there is no defiance – for Dumas, it is simply a state of being: the only one that can be truly shared.
Dumas’ sources are consciously secondary. She paints and draws her subjects, mostly women and often nude, from mass-produced images culled from newspapers and magazine clippings, film stills, erotica, the history of art and personal snapshots. Bookcases line her studio, dotted with labels from “Heaven, Paradise” to “Porn”. Born out of a reliance on reproductions, the artist’s work complicates ontological questions around the distance between art and its referent and the dialectical roles of creator and spectator. Given the tensile relationship between painting and photographic documentation, Dumas not only understands but expects viewers will project meaning onto her work, even referring to herself as “Miss Interpreted.” Her attitude can be readily understood as an invitation to claim a stake in the history her work contains. In Love your Neighbor, Dumas’ grievances are neither overt nor one-dimensional—her painting does not demand, criticize or definitively opine on the state of the world but rather suggests, gently inviting alternatives, nuance and humanity to reenter collective conversations on how to move forward. It solemnly acknowledges the melancholia and fragility of a familiar yet faraway nation, and its subjects are neither pitied nor glorified. They are loving, lucid bodies: naked but freed of canonical associations of nudity with purity and docility. Though they are placeless, these couples are firmly grounded in reality – albeit a fraught and deeply flawed one – and gently propose togetherness as a cure to cruelty, human fallibility, subjugation and disenfranchisement.
The apex of Dumas’ poetic enterprise, Love your Neighbor’s gift to us is its sensitivity – its ambiguity is hardly evasive or stingy but instead offers its viewer an image to meditate on, to think both of oneself and others. The present work testifies to her enduring preoccupation with the body and her many roles as artist, writer, provocateur and keen social observer. One of the most influential artists of her generation, Dumas is acutely aware of the gravity of painting and the crisis of image-making. Hauntingly ambient and solemnly beautiful, the present work is an intimate response to the events and processes responsible for empathy’s failure to materialize in the law, but Love your Neighbor offers assurance that not all hope has been lost.
