Helena (1992)

A particularly powerful and somewhat early example of Marlene Dumas’s painterly practice can be seen in her work Helena (1992). This intimately scaled portrait of the artist’s daughter as a child vibrates with an intense frequency as the determined look of its subject willfully confronts the viewer. Working in a consciously unorthodox and slightly unnatural palette of greens, ochres, blacks, and blues, Dumas creates an apparition of Helena with an economy of means and a few simple gestures. A flick of her wrist here and there evokes two eyebrows, a tightly pursed pair of lips, and two extremely focused eyes that together convey a forceful skepticism.

Rendered with an almost watery distorted focus on a field of burnt umber, Helena is almost completely present in our world while keeping one foot in the painting itself. Her visage offers up a starkly determined rebelliousness, which, when combined with Dumas’s almost ethereal handling of her palette, triggers an oscillation back and forth across the threshold between the world that we inhabit and the netherworld of oils and pigments.