‘To paint is an apology for painting,” writes Marlene Dumas, in the introductory essay to her new show Mourning Marsyas. Discuss, I want to insist, as if her comment were an exam question. But before we can make any headway, she’s leading me from painting to painting, around Frith Street Gallery in London. There’s one of a rock that looks like a face. Other faces, stoic in grief and resilience, stare back. Elsewhere, there’s a looming timeless head called Nemesis that looks like it is out to get me. Figures and faces emerge from pours of paint that have provoked them into life. Some appear the work of an instant, others have been reworked. There are uneasy figures in rooms, awkward confrontations, paintings called War and Ceasefire. Some paintings allude obliquely to current conflicts, to terrible incidents, domestic dramas and personal distress. Others are closer to mythological nightmares. The devil’s in there too. We’ll come to him.
Based in Amsterdam since the 1970s, the South African painter has held major exhibitions at MoMA in New York and throughout Europe, including Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Her travelling retrospective, The Image as Burden, came to Tate Modern in London 10 years ago. In her long career, Dumas has painted babies, children and the very old. She has painted women masturbating, vulvas and cocks. She has painted the disgraced music producer Phil Spector, Osama bin Laden and Pauline Opango Lumumba, widow of the assassinated Congolese premier Patrice Lumumba.
She has made images of Jesus, poet Charles Baudelaire, writer Céline on his deathbed and British codebreaker Alan Turing. There have been hangings and skulls, kids posing for their school portrait, and the West Bank separation barrier erected by Israel. She has used photographic source material, she has asked people to pose and she has made things up. Now 71, she is taking her works on a further turn. She writes that the paintings “are heavy with the weight of a bad conscience, deceased loves, past failures and present atrocities”. At the start of the 2020s, her partner, the painter Jan Andriesse, and her close friend, the Moroccan-Dutch writer Hafid Bouazza, both died, as did her brother Pieter. The losses have had their impact.
A rapidly painted little girl stands with an elderly man looming behind her. The painting began as a family portrait but, as Dumas explains, it then went in a different direction. “He’s not the grandfather any more! I gave him sunglasses, a cigarette – and he began to look like a mafioso.” At one point, he resembled Hitler. “It’s easy to make someone look like Hitler, even if you don’t want to. All you need is a little black mark, just there.” She points at his nose. Begun more than 20 years ago, as an image of a young Jewish girl with her grandfather, the painting is now called History. “One thing my work is always about,” she says, “is ambiguity.”
The exhibition’s title comes from a tall, narrow painting of the same name. In Ovid’s telling, the carefree satyr Marsyas challenges Apollo to a music competition and loses. Apollo, who cheated, has him skinned alive. It is the subject of one of Titian’s last great paintings. In Dumas’s version, Marsyas’s torture is treated almost tenderly, his body embraced by the silhouetted figure who is flaying him. This dark form began as a streak of poured black paint. Now it could be a ram or a bird. Two smaller figures catch Marsyas’s blood. Marsyas, Dumas says, spoke truth to power.
Dumas is good at the pithy and arresting. In conversation, as well as in her art, she is at once loose and precise, open to letting things go where they will without losing the plot. This is what makes her art so exhilarating. In 2019, she exhibited her own work alongside Edvard Munch in Oslo, and began the small painting Utøya, wanting to say something about the massacre of 69 young people at a summer camp on the Norwegian island in July 2011, the culmination of a murderous campaign by a far-right lone gunman.
She only finished the painting last year, having given up the idea of creating an elegiac Munch-like moon and island. What began as the moon is now as black as a bowling ball, sunken in darkness. I suggest that it looks like a child’s head resting on the far side of a puddle. In the water something shimmers, like the reflection of a pair of legs, an otherwise unseen presence. We stand there looking. “It isn’t clear to me either,” Dumas admits.
Instead of Polaroids, or images culled from newspapers, the new paintings often begin with paint poured or thrown on to the canvas, as a sort of provocation. In Two Gods, the paint eventually became a pair of erect black cocks. In Pareidolia, a broken field of speckled greyish blue is resolved into something like a bound head, a cracked stone or the face of a melting snowman, staring back blindly. There’s a feeling of vulnerability, of a wounded human countenance.
Dumas happily admits that she doesn’t always know what she’s got. “Sometimes I look at my work, almost as a third person, and think, ‘What have I done?’” Pareidolia is a psychological phenomena, the involuntary tendency to see creatures in clouds, cities in fires, the face of the Virgin Mary on a cupcake. Artists have been using random smudges and accidents to get their imaginations going for centuries.
After every show, Dumas finds it hard to begin afresh. “I get disgusted with myself, with painting in general, with my own work. I have to force myself to start again.” But then the paint begins to generate forms. “At first I can’t start,” she says, “and then I can’t stop.”
Two canvases of close-up, open-mouthed faces in profile began in 2018 as a couple kissing. The paired works sat in her studio until Dumas, dissatisfied, reversed their positions so that they face away from one another, their intimacy replaced by enmity. Now the work is called The Enemy. Another painting, The Widow, had its origin in a found image of actor Christopher Lee as Dracula, white-faced in his black cloak. The Widow is almost entirely suffused with black, the face muffled and with dark sunken eyes. I’m drawn to the hands, nervously clasping one another. How paintings begin is one thing, where they end another. There’s a difference, I suggest, between the stories you tell yourself while you are painting and the story the painting itself tells. “They’re different things,” she says. “You don’t always have to trust the artist’s story.”
The last painting in the show – and the most recently completed – is a small portrait of the devil, in profile, with wispy goatee and sprouting horns, as well as some kind of homunculus resting on his shoulder. “I was sitting with this canvas on my lap,” says Dumas, “and poured some paint on it. I was rocking the canvas this way and that, like rocking a baby to sleep, and the paint made these little horns and what looked like a goatee, and here came the devil. And the paint made this other little thing, like a child or something resting on his shoulder, with what looked like eyes. I thought, ‘That is a bad match.’”
The image looks entirely purposeful. Coaxing the orange paint this way and that, Dumas seems to have conjured – rather than painted – the image into existence. “I think art may be a pact with the devil,” she says. “But for me, with my background and my relation to art, I don’t trust myself, I don’t trust art.” Why did Dumas call the painting The Devil May Care? “Sometimes, I would like to be totally irresponsible and say I’m not going to try. I want to be like the satyr and get drunk and not care – because how does my guilt help anybody? What does it serve?”
She goes on: “I’m back to my first love – the gesture that can’t decide if it wants to be a face or a figure. I have no option but to do something with it. That’s my cross. It’s a case of letting it happen. But I think I should stop moaning, because one has got little time left, and one’s not dead yet – and you should be glad you can still do something.”
• Mourning Marsyas is at Frith Street Gallery, London, until 16 November
