Marlene Dumas: Cycladic Blues

Curated by independent curator Douglas Fogle in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition emerges as a direct response to the histories of figuration that Dumas explored within the archaeological collections of the Museum of Cycladic Art. For this exhibition, Dumas has personally selected works from across her oeuvre, while, in a rare gesture, she has also hand-picked a group of fourteen archaeological artefacts from the Museum’s collection to be presented alongside her own works.

Born in South Africa in 1953 during the years of Apartheid, but having lived and worked in Amsterdam for nearly five decades, Marlene Dumas has spent her career using the practice of painting to explore deeply human states of being, ranging from violence, mourning, and melancholy to joy and tenderness. She has repeatedly done this by taking the human body as her subject in exhibitions at museums across the world such as Palazzo Grassi in Venice (2022), the Musée d’Orsay in Paris (2021), Tate Modern in London (2015), the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (2014), and the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2008).

The exhibition brings together more than forty paintings and works on paper spanning over three decades, offering a representative view of Dumas’s strangely beautiful and provocative representations of the human form. Among them are two new monumental paintings: Old (2025) and Phantom Age (2025), created especially for this exhibition at the Museum of Cycladic Art.

Dumas’s paintings are 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 have either directly inspired or resonate with Dumas’s works on view, highlighting enduring and universal themes such as life, love, motherhood, gender, and mortality. This rare pairing invites visitors to reflect on both the timelessness and immediacy created by the coexistence of Dumas’s works with creations from the past.

Whether looking at Dumas’s intimate ink, crayon and pencil drawings on paper or her monumentally scaled vertical canvases, we become spectators in a theatre of human experience that the artist is able to conjure with the touch of her hand and the slight movements of her brush. Indeed, as she has suggested, “Painting is about the trace of the human touch.” In the wide variety of faces, torsos, full length bodies and isolated body parts that Dumas materializes with her hand from the nothingness of tubes of oil paints, we come to see what she means.

In the two monumentally scaled vertical works Old (2025) and Phantom Age (2025), for example, that Dumas created specifically for the exhibition at the Museum of Cycladic Art, she continues her investigation of the passage of life over time while also furthering her exploration of different modes of painting. Based on a sculpture from the second century B.C. titled The Old Market Woman, depicting a woman dressed for a Dionysian feast, both paintings exhibit different perspectives on their shared source image as well as diverse means of production.

This catalogue accompanies the exhibition “Marlene Dumas: Cycladic Blues” at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens, featuring over 40 paintings and works of paper, combined with over 30 antiquities from the museum’s collection.

Grouped into categories—family, portrait, erotic figure, fragmented body and portraits of sculptures—Dumas’s works enter into a timeless dialogue with the abstracted human forms of the Cycladic figurines created by unknown artists several millennia ago. As the artist states on the first page: “This is a book for all time; from being born, being young, being attractive and seductive, being betrayed and attacked, to being old and trying not to die”.

With texts by Douglas Fogle, exhibition curator, and Marlene Dumas.