All of Marlene Dumas’s paintings and drawings reveal the body, full-frontal. The body takes control, loudly asserting its condition: carnal, disturbing, vulnerable, furious, subversive, mortal and impulsive, portrayed in undisciplined, challenging images. At the entrance to open-end, the exceptional exhibition curated at the Palazzo Grassi by Dumas and Caroline Bourgeois, two naked bodies, battling against any form of objectification or voyeurism, stand as subjects, one of them in provocative insurrection, the other in passivity. A naked young man looks down at his violet, erect penis. He is his own focus of attention, indifferent to what or who surrounds him. A woman, also naked, on her backside, raises her legs, shamelessly exhibiting her genitals, proudly staring us in the face. The two bodies dominate not only the space of the canvas but also the space of the viewer, who is immediately vanquished by their aplomb.
“Somewhere between description and suggestion, explicitness and subtlety, roughness and refinement. These bodies are ambivalent : their ghostly yet carnal presence haunts you for days.”