50+ (2010-2018)

In 50+ (2010-2018), Dumas offers us both a marker of her shifting stylistic gestures and a meditation on the endless forward movement of time.  In this work we see the head of a mature woman thrown back in an indeterminate expression of agony or joy. Completed some thirty years after her work Helena (1992), this explosive if small-scale work was inspired by a close-up postcard image of a Roman copy of a notable Hellenistic sculpture depicting a drunken old woman with a wine jug.

In Dumas’s hands, the realistic features of the “original” sculpture are transformed into a kind of unstable and flickering double vision that leaves behind a ghostly afterimage. Pulling and scraping paint across the figure’s skin to reveal the material warp and weft of the canvas, Dumas’s homage to this Dionysian figure seems to float joyfully in and out of focus while deploying a purposeful liquidity that speaks to the power of her minimal gestures to create something out of nothing.