Leather Boots (2000)
High Heeled Shoes (2000)

My art is situated between the pornographic tendency to reveal everything and the erotic inclination to hide what it’s all about.

The entire complexity of life—sex, birth, aging and death—plays an equally important role in Marlene Dumas’s unique form of painterly practice. For example, the various erotic bodies that populate many of her paintings, such as the luminous, back-lit crouching figure of Leather Boots (2000), the kneeling chiaroscuro protagonist of High Heeled Shoes (2000), or the contorted and dream-like phantom of her watercolor Dorothy D-Lite (1998) (on view in the first floor rotunda gallery), were based on images from pin up and pornographic magazines or Polaroid photographs that that the artist took of erotic dancers in Amsterdam whose bodies appealed to her in some way. While admiring the formal aspects of the bodies of her subjects—the curve of the line of a crouching back, the symmetry of the arches formed by buttocks seen from behind—Dumas’s erotic paintings also foreground the circulation of gazes back and forth between the viewer and the viewed.

While the artist might be painting strippers, her practice of painting portraits (whether her subjects are famous or anonymous) itself enacts a kind of stripping. As she’s said in relation to this topic, “it’s not so much about exposing roles, or making the rich look dirty or the famous ordinary — it’s a stripping down to that melancholy sex appeal that makes surnames disappear and first names fictional.”