Marlene Dumas

“Is the information necessary in a work contained in the work itself? I say it isn’t. It is mostly contained outside the work. One can [I do] and must, at times, put words in the mouth of the work and/or take them away again. Our eyes are close to our ears” (the artist cited in Marlene Dumas: Suspect, Milan 2003 p. 17).

Executed in extremely diluted watercolour, The Passion represents one of Dumas’ most intense and profound works on paper. Depicting two watery faces pressed together in an intimate moment, the dark ink outlines bleed into the surrounding watercolour, blurring their features. The most prominent face is upside-down, disengaged from the body and painted an oxygen-deprived blue-grey. The accompanying face is composed in warmer red tones, and together the faces fill the frame, with no other visual context. The only information Dumas deemed relevant for the background is the title, found in her fragile script in the upper left corner: The Passion.

Familiarity with Western Tradition and Dumas’ oeuvre leads the viewer to Christ’s final hours on earth. The same year she painted The Passion, Dumas painted a collection of twenty-one portraits of Jesus. With this knowledge, the pallid face of The Passion becomes that of the lifeless Christ. 1994 also saw Dumas paint what are arguably her most renowned works, the Models series and the Rejects series. These ink washes depict famous models, and their anonymous, ugly opposites, respectively. The separate series, when considered together, form dyads that focus on attraction and repulsion, inclusion and exclusion, and the politics of group dynamics—prominent themes in Dumas’ work that are often linked to her upbringing in Apartheid-torn South Africa.