Immaculate (2003)

A number of Dumas’s works take human genitals as their topic, and she has frequently commented on the beauty of the human form. The intimate painting Immaculate frames the corporeal geometry of the lower female torso with a forthright formal frontality. Firmly rejecting any classical moralistic dichotomy between pure and sullied states of being, Immaculate almost cinematically projects an image of the beginning and the end of both painting and life.

This work vibrates at a frequency almost imperceptible to the human eye, its muted palette of blues, pinks, blacks, and grays resonating with a paradoxically frenetic stillness. As with all of Dumas’s paintings it is hard to separate the materiality of the paint from the body, or rather, bodies, being depicted.