ART CITIES: Athens-Marlene Dumas

Marlene Dumas, employing a visual language that interweaves formal rigor with an undercurrent of narrative depth, appears to reconstruct a “heterotopia”—a space where ancient memory functions as an echo rather than mere backdrop. Her inaugural museum solo exhibition in Greece, titled “Cycladic Blues,” concludes in early November and bears the curatorial imprint of both the artist herself and Douglas Fogle.

By Mimika Christodoulopoulou
Photo: Mimika Christodoulopoulou’s Archive

Marlene Dumas’s curatorial gesture, her deliberate selection of antiquities with which her contemporary works engage in dialogue, proves resoundingly successful in most galleries, as does the spatial disposition of the works across the exhibition space. Even when dispersed throughout different rooms, the pieces maintain an exemplary visual conversation. Her selections from the museum’s permanent collection are far from arbitrary; they constitute a consciously articulated gesture that reveals her profound understanding of a transhistorical language of the human body and its representation. The Cycladic figurines and other antiquities, through their reductive power and eloquent silence, function simultaneously as counterpoint and as resonant echo to the corporeal intensity of her painted interventions.

The two monumental site-specific works conceived specifically for this exhibition, “Old” (2025) and “Phantom Age” (2025), appear to constitute a chapter in Dumas’s ongoing investigative trajectory concerning temporal passage and bodily deterioration. These expansive vertical compositions impress through their material abundance and painterly audacity. Dumas, employing varied techniques of chromatic application —from delicate watercolor traces to densely layered, nearly theatrical surfaces— generates an aesthetic tension that mirrors the dual nature of the human condition. Speaking to her artistic practice, she herself has stated: “Painting concerns the trace of human touch.”

Particularly compelling is a work of modest dimensions, “Immaculate” (2003), which constitutes a response to Gustave Courbet’s “L’Origine du monde” (1866). Executed in gray tonalities, the work foregoes any celebration of life or fecundity, instead evoking loss, deprivation, and desolation. Its formal intensity and visual abundance correspond to an interior silence, as Dumas herself has observed: “It is so sorrowful. As if no one had ever entered there. As if no one had ever returned from there.” This work, which could easily be overlooked given its modest scale, establishes a remarkably generative visual dialogue with surrounding pieces, both contemporary and ancient. The spatial positioning of the work permits this organic communion, evidencing the curatorial sensitivity of both the artist and Douglas Fogle, who astutely characterizes the juxtaposition as an anachronistic pas de deux—a term borrowed from ballet denoting a duet requiring perfect coordination between two performers—describing the corporeal coexistence Dumas creates between her painted bodies and the abstracted human forms of Cycladic figurines crafted five thousand years prior.

The exhibition “Cycladic Blues” is not merely an encounter between the contemporary and the ancient. Rather, it constitutes a meditation on what it means to inhabit a human body across temporal registers—to remain incomplete, to age, to dissolve. Through her works, Dumas offers us the inverse of forgetting: an austere acknowledgment of mortality and the beauty concealed within it.

Off the Record

• The works’ visual potency varied unevenly across the exhibition spaces, with certain galleries achieving remarkable resonance while others receded in intensity.
• The exhibition’s admission price moved at prohibitive levels for the broader Greek public, inevitably limiting accessibility to this event.

Photo: Installation View “Marlene Dumas – Cycladic Blues”, Museum of Cycladic Art – Athens, 2025, Photo: © & Courtesy Mimika Christodoulopoulou

Info: Curator: Douglas Fogle, Museum of Cycladic Art, Stathatos Mansion, Vasilissis Sofias Ave & 1 Irodotou St., Athens, Greece, Duration: 5/6-2/11/2025, Days & Hours: Mon, Wed & Fri-Sat 10:00-17:00, Thu 10:00-20:00, Sun 11:00-17:00, https://cycladic.gr/