Glass Tears (for Man Ray), (2008)

A painting is, for me, not only an image. I’m very much aware that it’s a physical object…It is this mixture of the physical and the metaphysical, in a sense, that I want.

Photography has always played an important role in Marlene Dumas’s painting practice and there is almost no painting in her oeuvre without a photographic source. Dumas came across the source image for this work, the Surrealist artist Man Ray’s 1932 photograph Glass Tears, in a book devoted to crying and the cultural history of tears. While this work references the exactitude of photography it is a painting made up of different gestures and styles as its background was made by throwing little drops of water across the canvas. The book on crying that Dumas referenced in the making of this work suggested that Modernism did not generally display emotions (such as women crying) graphically. For Dumas this work became an attempt to rescue expressions of grief from the realm of kitsch.