In London, ADRIAN SEARLE finds much to wonder at in a show of drawings by South African-born Marlene Dumas
MARLENE DUMAS’S drawing show at London’s Tate Gallery is about love, sex, bodies, babes, illness, Jesus and God. Dumas, who has shown in Britain before, but not to enough notice, is one of the most interesting figurative painters to have emerged in Europe since the 1970s. Her work is hugely enjoyable, by turns funny, brave and revealing, and is brilliantly executed. Her drawings of heads and figures float on the white paper with the brevity and exactitude of a perfectly chosen single word.
Dumas’s drawings have always complemented and been given as much status as her paintings. She has a great touch, using old-fashioned brush and wash to describe God as a blob, Jesus as a perfect lover and to produce endless groups of large-scale portrait heads, full-length nude studies and an alarmingly hirsute erect penis.
On this last drawing she has written: “There was a girl that when she was young thought it was all covered in hair.” Dumas, who lives in Holland, was brought up in the Dutch Reformed Church in Cape Town, and her rendering of English is as odd-ball and unnerving as her work. A strict Protestant upbringing, and the racism of apartheid South Africa, led her to focus on sex, religion and the colour of skin. Once, she painted a black woman in a white face-pack, and her large-scale figure paintings in the Netherlands Pavilion at the Venice Biennale last year featured black supermodel Naomi Campbell.
Her drawings are loosely washed-in, tonally precise masses and silhouettes, fleshed out and given form with bleeds of ink. It is a speedy, hit-and-miss technique which communicates vitality. She manages a surprising range and variety of touch, and an ability to depict not only flesh, but also to give her figures and faces a great deal of emotional range and character. In one series, Chlorosis (Lovesick), she depicts 24 male and female heads, some with lascivious, open mouths, others disconsolate, lovelorn and lost in self-reflection. In Jesus Serene we find 21 heads of Christ: a cliched long-haired blonde Jesus, a woman Jesus with a goatee, an adult baby Jesus, Jesus as the perfect lover and art-historical Jesuses – Romanesque, medieval Flemish, Gothic and modern.
Sometimes Dumas homes in on more difficult territory, depicting a woman as a purple-faced victim slumped, bruised and damaged, in a corner. In What Ever Happened to the Greeks we get a between-the-legs view of a hairy old Greek god gazing down at the tip of his own ejaculating penis. An apt drawing for the Tate, and a wry coda to a memorable show.