Works on paper

Back (1994) • Torso (c. 1998) • Long Neck (fragment) (c. 1998) • Anguish (2000) • Jesus looking for his cross (1994) • Trapped (2001) • The Conversation in the Garden of Eden (c. 1998) • Head (2019)

I never had a desire for a camera. I loved to play and draw in the sand.

Drawing has always played a central role in Dumas’s life and career. As a medium, it has held its own unique place in her artistic practice and has never been about preparing for the production of a painting. Working in ink, pencil and crayon, Dumas’s drawings on paper exhibit an almost ethereal looseness and liquidity that speaks to their having an almost living quality.

As her longtime partner  Jan Andriesse once said: “When Dumas draws a line, the line says, “I am aware and conscious.” This group of work spans two decades and features simple gestures in which Dumas’s fluid ink lines seem to have minds of their own as they consciously congeal into the fragmented features of bodies (a back, a torso, a neck and a head) that move from the tragic to the comic, evoke troubled states of being, or allude to dramatic biblical scenes.