The idealism of the female nude, figures devoid of decision-making power, chaste and pure, are torn apart by the work of Marlene Dumas, who frees her subjects from their ideal prison and casts them brusquely into the dimension of reality. Spread, painted in 1999, portrays a female nude, silhouetted against a luminescent purple background which amplifies the pallor of her complexion in a frank and unfiltered manner. The work portrays a woman who takes on the universal appearance of a subject like many others, which as recalled by Dumas, makes the viewer almost convinced of sharing a sense of intimacy with the artist, a sort of relatability with the subject and its creator: “I treat all my models equally. I find them all equally strange, and I find all humans equally scary” (Marlene Dumas quoted in: Deborah Nicholls-Lee, "Marlene Dumas," BBC, 18 October 2021, online).

Since the mid-90s, Marlene Dumas has turned her pictorial gaze on the idea of beauty and what it represents in the overlapping spheres of reality and imagination, investigating its consequences on the genre of the nude. Throughout an oeuvre defined by the transgressive possibilities of painting, Dumas has used nakedness to explore love, desire, shame and vulnerability, situating her art between “the pornographic tendency to reveal everything and the erotic inclination to hide what it is all about” (Marlene Dumas, “Pornographic Tendency,” in Mariska van den Berg, ed., Sweet Nothings, London 2015, p. 33). In the present work, Dumas refers to an ideal of beauty that can be defined as pornographic by putting her subject on display. The figure is loosely sketched, blurred by the artist’s soft mark-making which leaves the canvas bare in places. A tonal palette of saturated pinks, purples and blues give the composition a calm yet cold impression, removing any human tactility and drawing attention to the photographic source material: as she has explained, “painting is about the trace of the human touch. It is about the skin of a surface” (Marlene Dumas, “Women and Painting,” in Exh. Cat., London, Tate Modern, Marlene Dumas – The Image as Burden, 2014, p. 70). Working from images culled from magazines, newspapers, films, art history and her own polaroid photographs, Dumas enjoys the anonymity, the amoral touch that accompanies this distance. With an expressive, sensual handling of paint, Dumas lifts her works beyond their source imagery, exploiting the semantic transformations inherent in this shift between media. The present work epitomises the significance of this practice, a photographic image transformed into washes of lucid pigment.

The subject of the present work is confined to the picture plane, revealing her body yet also embodying a reclamation of the female form within a tradition of nudes. The artist recontextualises her subject through a binary process of revelation and obfuscation. While seeming to be fully spread and thus fully comprehensible, the figure’s identity is softened, obscured to the point of anonymity; here, the work transcends issues of gender, sexuality and voyeurism, instead finding broader political, social and aesthetic significance. In this way, Dumas demonstrates her capacity to shock and unsettle through painterly frankness, utilising overt sexuality and societal conceptions of vulgarity to implicate the art-viewing public in the conditions of her imagery. In Spread, Dumas' subject is objectified and yet remains a subjective force, defying conventions reinforced through centuries of art history, meeting the male gaze and gazing back, ultimately subverting it.