Old (2025)
Phantom Age (2025)

There is a mature looseness to Marlene Dumas’s painting—an almost alchemical economy of means—that has taken center stage in her artistic repertoire in recent years. In Dumas’s monumentally scaled vertical works Old (2025) and Phantom Age (2025), for example, which the artist painted specifically for this exhibition, she continues her investigation of the passage of life over time while also furthering her exploration of resistance in the body of painting. Paint is poured as well as moved by her brush along the lengths of these vertical canvases, bringing gravity, chance, and intentionality equally to bear on their outcomes. Based on a sculpture from the second century B.C. called 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.

While the languorous stillness and supple verticality of the body in Phantom Age was the result of the artist pouring a controlled flow of paint onto the surface of the canvas, Old resisted this technique and called upon Dumas to resort to her hand to summon its spectral countenance with a brush. In these works, the viscous substance of oil paints falls into a kind of geological timelessness while the actively aging “old” bodies that they form are frozen in medias res on their precipitous trajectory to the nothingness of death.