A series of remarkable meetings is taking place inside the elegant, neoclassical interiors of Athens’s Museum of Cycladic Art. In its latest exhibition, Cycladic Blues, ancient figurines from its permanent collection have been placed opposite the cool, psychologically fraught paintings and drawings of the South African-born artist Marlene Dumas.
It has become something of a cliché of contemporary art, to persuade its leading practitioners to enter into “dialogues” with works from the past; but few such shows ask us to leap across five millennia to make their point. The encounter is not an obvious one: the stiff, expressionless statuettes, commonly considered to be the foundation stones of western art, passing their time with Dumas’s nerve-jangling studies of the human figure.