The Museum of Cycladic Art has been showing work by contemporary artists in the context of its collection since 2009. While in some cases, as with Brice Marden in 2022, this was based on recurrent references to the Greek landscape and antiquity in the artist’s work, the current show of Marlene Dumas, “Cycladic Blues,” hinges on no such immediate connection. What brings the more than thirty works by Dumas—one of them being a suite of seventeen drawings—into dialogue with the upright Cycladic sculptures of roughly five thousand years ago is that they can be regarded as expressions of and reflections on the vitality and mortality of human beings.
Two recent works carry the signature of an artist who, at the age of seventy-two, is well aware that time could be growing short. Phantom Age, 2025, looks like a cutout human figure, but with a face whose shape has been made with poured paint, while in Old, 2025, the artist has used her brush to more precisely limn an aged face. Being old can make one feel “bad and sad,” writes Dumas in the catalogue, and at the opening she mentioned that she considers the show a reflective presentation. This pensive turn works out in her favor. The selection of works here is intimate, clear, and concise.
Over her long career Dumas has explored many ways of applying paint, oscillating between a fast and loose manner that welcomes chance and a search for greater precision and a more dramatic expression of the figure. The dialogue between photography and painting has been central to her practice, and she often reinterprets historical motifs, as in the two works I mentioned, which are based on images of a Roman copy of an ancient Greek sculpture. In contrast to melancholic paintings about fading life such as Old, there are also vivid and bold works, among them Leather Boots, 2000, depicting a stripper posing provocatively, and a cheeky child portrait, Helena, 1992. Positioned among the paintings are sculptures from the museum collection, such as an approximately fifteen-inch-high female figurine from the Early Cycladic II period, with the typical crossed arms and lyre-shaped head, on which the nose is articulated most clearly. Contrary to Dumas’s work, the archaeological pieces show no emotion but impress through their containment and, you could say, their efficiency: With just a few lines and curves a human body is materialized, and a presence is established.
The large portrait Cycladic Blues, 2020, is Dumas’s most explicit reference to Cycladic aesthetics, giving it a twist with two dots for the eyes and a curved line for the mouth. The head looks rather cartoonish and the painting seems oversize for what it transmits, but other works make a more profound impression, among them Skull (as a House), 2007, which evokes the ambivalence of picturing oneself at home in death, as if in a future already present. The quiet Alfa, 2004, is a monumental portrait of a recumbent figure, pale as death. The painterly play between hard, defined lines and blurry areas perfectly supports the motif.
The exhibition’s curator, Douglas Fogle, calls Dumas’s work a metaphorical act of resistance, “an attempt to preserve the traces of our existence while acknowledging the movement of time toward an end point.” Yet I wonder if preservation is really what the artist has in mind. For her, the act of painting seems to serve as the best way to grasp life in its drama, dynamics, and ambivalence. It’s about being now, more than forever.
And what about the Cycladic sculptures, do they speak about mortality or eternity? Some were found in graves and must have played a commemorative role. Yet from their appearance it’s hard to say if they expressed mourning, heralded a festive event, or invoked the grace of the gods. What they do express is containment, simple grace, and dignity, and they do so without hinting, as Dumas does, at a personal narrative. They connect us to an age-old urge to create images of humankind, rather than of an individual to be remembered.
This text by Jurriaan Benschop was first published in Artforum, November 2025. The exhibition took place from 5 June till 2 November, 2025.