Transparent Magdalena (without head)

Marlene Dumas’s Transparent Magdalena (without head) renders a languid female body, pictured from the knees to the mouth. The anonymous woman, half-identified only by the title, sports long black hair that rests on—but fails to obscure—her exposed chest. Despite the title, Magdalena is not entirely transparent. Passages of translucent ink give her body a ghostly quality while her shoulders, lower chest and pelvic area are darkly shadowed and appear solid and corporeal. Her decision to render the female nude sans head and feet constitutes a challenge to the sumptuousness of that ancient tradition and an attempt to redefine it.

This work boasts a powerful but abbreviated femininity. She confronts the viewer by crowding the composition and pushing up against the picture plane. Her womanhood is conveyed through basic signifiers of sex rather than through any sort of sensuality. All the while her face is absent, giving the work a degree of atmospheric uncertainty: at once implying melancholy and questioning that immediate instinct.

The indian ink wash treatment gives the overall appearance of Transparant Magdalena a greyish tonality with more darker and more lighter parts. The make-up of this greyish watery stained body gives her a neutral monumental aspect, where race cannot be identified. An important example of Dumas’s drawing practice, this work finds the artist exploring the possibilities of monochromatic figuration.