Formal Analysis on Marlene Dumas

Marlene Dumas was born in Cape Town, South Africa on August 3rd, 1953, making her presently 66 years old. Growing up in an isolated, religious, and uneventful city, Dumas resorted to collecting pictures and drawing cartoon girls and women in order to pass the time. At 19, Dumas attended the Michaelis School of Fine Art, a school within the University of Cape Town. Throughout 1972 to 1975, Dumas gained exposure and interest from her fellow peers and professors, and began dedicating a practice in conceptual art, body art, performance, and painting. Ethics, philosophy, psychology, political science, and theory were academic areas of interest for Dumas, which heavily influence and inform her work.

The young Dumas moved to Amsterdam in 1976 after being awarded a two-year scholarship at Ateliers 63, a small, progressive and unaccredited art school. It was during these incredibly trying and formative years that Dumas began experimenting with pornographic and violent imagery from magazines and newspapers. Collecting clippings of those specific areas of imagery became a permanent part of the artist’s painting process.

Eroticism, prostitution, war, sex, death, love, violence, innocence, and the human psyche are consistent themes in Dumas’ extensive collection of paintings and drawings. The neo-expressionist artist cleverly manipulates muted and dark colors with expressive and erratic brush strokes to create tension between the ambiguity and clarity in the subject matter of her work. Dumas has been and continues to be a prominent figure in the contemporary world of painting, and is one of, if not the most successful female painters in all of history.

The Visitor perfectly exemplifies the Marlene Dumas’ extensive body of work expanding over the last few decades. The Visitor was created by Dumas in the year 1995 using oil paint on an 80 x 110 inch stretched canvas. On July 1st of 2008, Dumas’ The Visitor sold for $6,337,340 US Dollars at the Sotheby’s London Auction.  

The painting depicts six young, half-dressed women standing in a broken line formation inside a small, dark, empty room. The women vary in size, dress, and appearance (skin color, hair length/color). Although each of the figures have differing physical traits, each woman poses in the same fashion. The women’s stances mimic a stiff and unnatural contrapposto, one weightless leg jutted forwards, with the opposite leg standing straight and baring the weight of their curvy bodies. The women face an open door with their hands clasped and fingers interlaced behind their backs, slightly resting their forearms on their lower back and butts.

There is a bright, artificial light shining from the open door, slightly illuminating the dark room where the young women are waiting. The incandescent opening serves as a powerful focal point in the composition with the help of a clear baroque diagonal created by a clean edge where the back wall meets the floor, and the ascending heights of the three women furthest to the back wall. It is clear that the door holds a great significance in the subject matter, as it is constantly drawn to the eye through the use of contrast in value as well as being the end point of the powerful duo diagonals within the piece. However, a quarter of the door is blocked by the figure closest to the viewer, creating an entirely new mystery to hypothesize. Perhaps the woman is blocking something or someone that we cannot see beyond the door. Or rather, the woman is being used in a technical manner, as a slight diagonal towards the two figures to her right.

Equivalently, the asymmetrical composition constitutes balance through the imbalanced placement of key moments throughout the scene; there is a balanced pyramid created by the three women on the compositional left, the three women on the compositional right, and the door being the top of the pyramid. The eye is consistently lead to the door, the apex of the triangle, yet does not linger due to the critical weight held by the promiscuous women. The Visitor exemplifies the robust function of the rule of thirds, as the doorway rests in the intersection of the upper right and middle rectangle line, yet again, forcing the eye to examine the subject. Additionally, the rule is successfully utilized with the placement of the women’s hands resting on the lowest horizontal third of the composition. Highlighting the submissive action of the women’s hands resting on a delicate and sensual area of the female figure provokes more mystery as to what may be occurring in this moment in time.

Dumas’ exaggerated use of saturated blue-green for shadows and bright red for highlights establishes unity through complementary opposition. Yellow and purple tones and hues create an additional complexity, specifically in the skin of the women, and the light reflecting off of the floor and the hair of the women. Sharp edges created by confidently thick and saturated brush strokes add emphasis to the figures’ arms, legs, and shoes. Although the walls and floor are painted with larger areas of singular color compared to the figure, these shapes emulate an incredible dimension through layering a variety of pigment, and allowing windows of earlier layers to shine through the top levels of the paint. The patterned clothing adds variety to the smoothly rendered naked parts of the women, yet does not distract from the rest of the painting, which is not an easy feat to accomplish when pattern is involved.

Dumas’ The Visitor embodies the work that she has been creating within the last few decades. Sex and mystery permeate the entire painting, from the half-naked women seemingly lining up inside a room, maybe waiting to please whomever will be joining them, or they are waiting to perform for a room full of spectators. The confident stances of the women suggest that they consistently act out this scene, yet we do not know how they feel about what they are doing from an emotional standpoint. The clasped hands resting on their lower backs alludes to submissive behavior, an innocent action often forced upon children for teaching manners, or for restriction in the world of BDSM. There is a mystery in whether these clasped hands insinuate the women’s lack of control, or appearing to be docile and innocent in order to be punished easily by the dominant subject.  

Although the women are not fully nude, as all of the upper torsos of their bodies are covered with clothing, there is an added promiscuity with not being able to see the entire body naked. When a figure is depicted in the nude, there is no place to wonder or to fantasize. Dumas strategically makes sure that the figures are ambiguous in their identity by adding the minimal amount of clothing and not showing a single face of any of the women. The viewer is forced to wonder what these women look like, what emotions display their faces, what their bodies look like underneath their garments. We question if these characters are tired, worn out, young, old, beautiful, beaten, deranged even. There is potential for feeling sorry for these women, or for some, feelings of arousal and fantasizing what will be enacted next.  There is an incredible thrill in the seducing colors and composition, yet a deep sorrow and empathy for what the six women will soon face.