Full frontal flatness – Marlene Dumas in Venice, reviewed

Edward Behrens | Apollo | 1st April 2022

Dumas paints portraits, mostly single figures. From that point, her work heads off in all directions, addressing death, eroticism, gender politics, racism. But if her subject matter is various, many of her works share a certain starkness. One critic calls the show “extraordinary” but this writer seems to feel  confronted by that style. “There isn’t a sense here of ‘the pleasures of painting’ … It is fascinating to look at them, but it is also unnerving”. Or, as Dumas has said “A painting is not a postcard.”