The Brooklyn Rail

This smallish, elegant museum in an old mansion on an Athens boulevard has an ongoing program of monographic exhibitions of internationally recognized artists. In every recent case, the artists received their first museum show in Greece here. In each the context afforded new insights into the artist’s output.

In 2023, the Greek independent curator Dimitrios Antonitsis and the American Brice Marden organized Brice Marden and Greek Antiquity that drew comparisons between general notions of the antique, selections from the permanent collection and Marden’s paintings, drawings, prints, collages and notebooks. Last year, the museum presented Cindy Sherman at Cycladic: Early works. The American artist’s photographic output has virtually no foundation in canonical artworks from any period in world history, let alone the antique.

Presently installed is Cycladic Blues, forty artworks by the South African, Netherlands-based artist Marlene Dumas, who was first asked to exhibit in 2022. In addition to studying art in South Africa, she was also a student of moral philosophy, which would seem that she defines making art as an act of empathy. The show produced two publications: the first, a full-sized pre-exhibition brochure, a record of speculation by Dumas thinking about “the beauty of the human body,” and her oeuvre with photographs from over her four-decade career. She has always had a hand in writing about her intentions and has her own observations published in the actual museum catalogue along with an essay by the independent curator Douglas Fogle. Fogle compares the act of painting with a resistance to death and Dumas statements in the catalogue are about death and aging too. Fogle quotes Dumas from a text she wrote about her painting Immaculate (2003), “I’d like my paintings to be very bare. To be as minimal as a figurative work could possibly be, without being dead.”

This says a lot about Dumas’s approach, which is just as much about the behavior of the paint as what is depicted. She demonstrates in a video in one of the museum’s rooms how she begins by letting the medium flow. Dumas works from photographs and more recently from photographs of sculpture, but this doesn’t detract from their sense of discovery. When it is ink on paper the medium will be very wet and runny, but after an initial gesture will be allowed to puddle; she lets it dry and set so that the spread takes on a granular surface that mimics both the graininess of a printed photograph or the texture of a stone or clay sculpture.

She has ventured beyond her utilization of the vocabulary of painting the photograph as codified by Gerhard Richter and Luc Tuymans by understanding the relatively recent re-position of the properties of the photograph. Briefly, how we contemporarily understand the photograph is as a fictional image, prone to its immediate context and since the advent of the digital, one that can be continuously revised, altered, improved, changed. It no longer is perceived or trusted to be a frozen moment of reality or a reliable documentation of an event.

Somewhat paradoxically, this situation would appear to present painting with an opportunity to renew its sporadic contract with the momentary and improvisational. Though it’s a misreading that painterly pictures are made as spontaneously as they might appear, it’s a convenient imaginary if one is looking for certain effects.

This differs entirely from Expressionist painting, which is generally defined as providing a glimpse into the artist’s subjectivity. This is certainly not the case in Dumas—she uses it partially to summon up an image of something, usually someone out in the world, not so much within herself, but the method does allow for an emotional immediacy, due to it giving a feeling of the fugitive, the transient.

Dumas seems to close the gap between the collection and her own affinities, which includes her history of depiction of mothers, families, sex workers, young women, almost always marginalized and vulnerable people, women, level hierarchies in the present and by association, in the islands. They are active figures. Though mostly naked, they exude a metropolitanism. Dumas’s way of shading her figures makes them look grungy, but knowing and grungy with life experience.

Dumas images in conversation with Cycladic figural sculpture and a few pots energizes the entirety of the exhibition. These ancient stone people are activated in such a way that daily life on these islands feels within reach. Meeting in marketplaces, arguing, sobbing, groaning, propositioning, cursing. It should be noted that two of the paintings she chose, both from 2021, are of donkeys: Donkey (daytime) and Donkey (nighttime). Beasts of burden were an integral part of life there, then and now, their presence further levels the hierarchies, though there is no indication that Dumas spent any time near the Cycladic islands.

Some of its history was central in the history of Greek and world culture. Situated between Crete and the mainland, the islands were a stopping point in Mediterranean trade and culture. Sculptors came from the mainland to learn how to carve marble. Donkeys hauled everything around and on some islands, like Hydra, they still do.

In Tristes Tropiques, Claude Levi-Strauss wrote,

By neolithic times, man had already made most of the inventions necessary for his safety … [he] knew how to protect himself against cold and hunger; he had achieved leisure in which to think…man was no freer than he is today; … he was protected by a cushioning of dreams…

Dumas paintings are all about the human condition; there’s a universality of sex and death present, but they are also strong as an alternative world. So strong that among the artifacts of a distant culture, they are able to occupy them, commune with them, and extend their hidden emotions into the present.