Marlene Dumas: ‘Mourning Marsyas’
Skinned alive, humiliated and left to rot. The corpse-like figures in hugely influential South African artist Marlene Dumas’s newest series of paintings have suffered, and their pain is almost tangible.
The mythological satyr figure of Marsyas suffers first in the show. A huge canvas details his flaying after losing in a musical competition to a cheating, tricky Apollo. It’s all slime and gunge and leering, darkened figures, a horrible, uncomfortable painting. And it only gets worse. Eyes and mouths peer out at you from the canvases, but their skin is bloated and grey, their eyes empty; two giant charred phalluses dominate one of the walls.
Downstairs, a girl is leered over by a man lost in shadows, bodies melt into each other on a filthy mattress, a devil seems to emerge from a sea of orange goo. The painting of the girl praying isn’t great, but the rest of the work here is excellent.
These are haunted, vile, dark images, filled with death and grief. They’re made by spilling paint and finding shapes, but all Dumas sees is pain and torment. Maybe it’s how she sees contemporary society, maybe it’s a reflection of her own emotional state, but either way, it makes for beautifully grim viewing.