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Lot Essay
The role of children in Marlene Dumas' paintings is a strange and ambiguous one. Painted in 1991, two years after she had become a mother in her own right, Untitled shows an infant looking out from the canvas with a disquieting and scrutinising gaze. Children had already appeared in her work before this point, but she explored the theme intensely during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Untitled is far from an idealised image of childhood innocence. It is a profoundly disturbing image that forces us to reappraise our notions of children and childhood. The lingering hint at adulthood conveyed by the child's posture and wary expression, introduces a sense of the uncanny that is heightened by the intense lurid pink background, conveying a powerful sense of implied violence, danger and loss of innocence.
Dumas works from second-hand images, even when they are her own photographs. It is in her painterly intervention, and the interpretation that this involves, that her pictures gain their eerie visual power and mystery. This throws into question the entire ability of an image to convey anything other than subjective information: "I am intimately involved with my subject matter...I am not disengaged from the subject of my gaze. With photographic activities it is possible that those who take the picture leave no traces of their presence, and are absent from the images. Paintings exist as the traces of their makers and by the grace of these traces. You can't take a painting - you make a painting." (Dumas, quoted in D. van den Boogerd, B. Bloom & M. Casadio (eds.), Marlene Dumas, London 1999, p. 122.) This sense of Untitled being a painting about painting is enhanced by the inscribed, inscrutable title. But for the South African-born artist, the inclusion of this banner conveying the lack of a label introduces a question of race, Dumas insisting that this child should exist outside the world of convenient but discriminatory pigeonholes.
Dumas works from second-hand images, even when they are her own photographs. It is in her painterly intervention, and the interpretation that this involves, that her pictures gain their eerie visual power and mystery. This throws into question the entire ability of an image to convey anything other than subjective information: "I am intimately involved with my subject matter...I am not disengaged from the subject of my gaze. With photographic activities it is possible that those who take the picture leave no traces of their presence, and are absent from the images. Paintings exist as the traces of their makers and by the grace of these traces. You can't take a painting - you make a painting." (Dumas, quoted in D. van den Boogerd, B. Bloom & M. Casadio (eds.), Marlene Dumas, London 1999, p. 122.) This sense of Untitled being a painting about painting is enhanced by the inscribed, inscrutable title. But for the South African-born artist, the inclusion of this banner conveying the lack of a label introduces a question of race, Dumas insisting that this child should exist outside the world of convenient but discriminatory pigeonholes.