Closing day Event. Marlene Dumas: Cycladic Blues

The Museum of Cycladic Art was pleased to present the first solo museum exhibition in Greece by renowned artist Marlene Dumas, one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary art. For this exhibition, Dumas personally selected works from across her oeuvre, while, in a rare gesture, she also hand-picked a group of fourteen archaeological artefacts from the Museum’s collection to be presented alongside her own works.

Dumas’s paintings were shown in conversation with fourteen antiquities from the Museum’s collections, ranging from schematic figurines of the Late Neolithic period and stylized marble figurines of the Cycladic Bronze Age to sculptural works from the Classical period, spanning regions from the Aegean to Cyprus.  These artefacts had either directly inspired or resonated with Dumas’s works on view, highlighting enduring and universal themes such as life, love, motherhood, gender, and mortality. This rare pairing invited visitors to reflect on both the timelessness and immediacy created by the coexistence of Dumas’s works with creations from the past.

Curated by independent curator Douglas Fogle in close collaboration with the artist.