Wallpaper*, review by Sofia Hallström
2025
‘Death is an evil. We have the gods' word for it; they too would die if death were a good thing.’ South African artist Marlene Dumas reads this poem attributed to the Ancient Greek poet Sappho, outside her exhibition ‘Cycladic Blues’, taking place across the neoclassical Stathatos Mansion in the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens. The poem cuts across time, framing death not as a transition to the next cycle of life, but as a failure – an affront even to the divine – and asserting its finality and violence. With this, Dumas sets the tone for ‘Cycladic Blues’, a deeply personal and expansive exhibition that moves through the many cycles that preoccupy her work: sex and desire, love and hate, life and death, guilt and innocence. The show draws connections between Dumas’ paintings, works on paper, and Cycladic and Hellenistic artefacts selected by the artist – some more than 4,000 years old – from the museum's permanent collection.
The majority of the ancient objects placed in dialogue with Dumas’ works – ranging from early pieces made in 1992 to new paintings created specifically for this exhibition – are Cycladic figurines. Carved from marble and originating from the nearby Cycladic islands, the figurines exude an eerie anonymity. Little is known about them with certainty; they were likely placed in graves and it is assumed they played a role in funerary rituals.
Their minimal, stylised forms – with folded arms, curved and smoothed-over features, and precisely incised lines marking sex and limbs – are a delicate abstraction of the human body, one that resonates with Dumas’ visual language. The ancient figures now stand in quiet proximity to her paintings, which chart the body in its most charged, exposed and intimate states. From the strip-club dancers portrayed in her Amsterdam series to martyrs, murderers and tender portraits of her daughter, Helena (1992), Dumas’ figures are consistently performing, ageing, desiring, or dying. The exhibition becomes not only a confrontation with death, but a meditation on how we face death, through the persistence of bodies, the repetition of ideals or gestures, and the act of image-making itself, in a dialogue that cycles across centuries.