Haunting yet beautifully exquisite, piercingly intense yet delicately ethereal, Marlene Dumas’s Die Baba (2) from 2005 brings together the utterly arresting style, iconic subject matter, and transfixing psychological depth for which she is best known. Cropped close and enlarged beyond life-size, advancing out of the dark blue ground, Dumas’ baby is assertive, powerful, and monumental. His unflinching gaze is that of an adult rather than an infant, while the dark tonalities of the painting lend the portrait an ominous sense of disquietude. Die Baba (2) responds to an earlier painting, Die Baba from 1985, which was painted before the birth of Dumas’ own baby in 1989. Situated on the other side of milestone pieces such as The First People (I-IV), 1990; the Black Drawings (1991-1992) and The Painter (1994), Die Baba (2) from 2005 evokes heightened layers of charged meaning. The palette in particular, executed in softly blended washes of lusciously muted tones, is a stark contrast from the sickly yellowish tones of the earlier Die Baba and nods towards racial tensions that marred her childhood. In the artist’s words, it’s “about blackness as a positive state, and the work is a tribute to black as a beautiful color”. Test.mes nt to the importance of this work, Die Baba (2) was included in Marlene Dumas: BROKEN WHITE at the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art in 2007. The painting was hung next to other significant portraits by the artist, most notably the self-portrait Het Kwaad is Banaal (Evil is Banal), 1984. Executed with a fluid, alluring application of paint, Die Baba 2 is an extraordinarily compelling example of contemporary portraiture and a moving treatise on race, history, and the fundamentals of human existence.

Born in 1953 in South Africa, Dumas has formulated one of the most critically acclaimed oeuvres of portraiture of our generation – one that articulates striking and nuanced perspectives of the human condition. Throughout her prodigious career, Dumas has interrogated issues of birth and death, sexuality and gender, the evil and the banal. Having fled the dominance of the apartheid in 1976 to continue her art education in Amsterdam, Dumas has operated within a position of self-imposed exile that fueled the sense of alienation so powerfully redolent in her art. Resistance to apartheid ideology has in many ways been the catalyst for Dumas’s incessant questioning of discriminatory binaries in her work. Black/white, beauty/ugliness, good/bad: these dichotomies represent the very core of Dumas’s practice. In 1995, Dumas represented Holland in the Venice Biennale, cementing her position as the nation’s most internationally acclaimed artist; while in 2014, her monumental retrospective exhibition The Image as Burden travelled from the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam to Tate Modern, London and the Fondation Beyeler in Basel. Critics have described her work as “painterly and provocative in equal measure” – “You notice the method – fluent, sumptuous, the paint sinking into the canvas in translucent stains, the brush carrying its licks and swipes with gliding expertise – at exactly the same moment as the subject, which is always human, always vulnerable, violent, suffering or dead” (Laura Cumming, “Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden review – painterly and provocative”, The Guardian, 8 February 2015).

The baby is a central theme within Dumas’ oeuvre. After Die Baba from 1985, Dumas gave birth to her daughter in 1989, later commencing more works surrounding the theme of babies and children. The First People (I-IV) from 1990 was loosely based on photographs of her baby daughter and her friend’s son; rendered on a huge mega-scale, these works convey the overwhelmingness of early motherhood and its associating conflicting notions of beauty, fascination, fear and terror. “All things are in themselves contradictory. And its [sic] this principle more than any other which expresses the truth, the very essence of things” (the artist cited in Matthias Winzen, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman’, in exh. cat., Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden Baden, Marlene Dumas: Female, 2005, p. 36). Dumas also began to create politically motivated works in the 1990s onwards, seen in Black Drawings, 1991-1992, a monumental grid of over 100 ink sketches of black heads. The close-up portrait format, featuring solitary heads, is grounded in an isolating focus that imbues each portrait with grandeur and melancholy. Inspired by the European existential painters such as Edvard Munch and Francis Bacon, Dumas’ own visual lexicon enacts in a sustained dialogue with one of art history’s most sustained genres – portraiture – while unflinchingly engaging with contemporary history’s haunting and continuing nightmares. Dumas furthermore reconfigures present practices of image consumption: painting not from photography or sourced images, Dumas eschews the traditional academic practice of life drawing, reinterpreting the image as subject. The artist has said: “I deal with second-hand images and first-hand experiences” (the artist cited in Mariska van den Berg, Sweet Nothings, Amsterdam, 1998, p. 24). Regarding her works of children, in particular, the artist has once controversially said: “It’s not a child. It’s a painting” (the artist cited in interview with Barbara Bloom, printed in Marlene Dumas, Dominic den Boogerd/Barbara Bloom/Mariuccia Caseeadio/Marlene Dumas, London, 1999 , p. 21). By relishing in the uncertainty of the painted image, Dumas demonstrates the contemporary relevance of the medium and positions herself as among the preeminent figurative painters of her generation.

瑪琳・杜馬斯的2005年作品《嬰兒2》畫面充滿戲劇力量，又不失空靈細膩，體現了這位藝術家最為人熟知的繪畫風格、經典創作主題以及精神深度。畫中的嬰孩特寫經過裁剪，比例大於真人尺寸，自深藍色背景中向前突出，神氣活現。這孩子眼神堅毅，似是成年人而非幼兒；同時，作品的深黑色調為畫中人注入一絲不祥氣息，令人忐忑不安。《嬰兒2》與杜馬斯於較早前完成的畫作《嬰兒》互相呼應，後者於1985年面世，而四年後，杜馬斯亦誕下了自己的骨肉。2005年問世的《嬰兒2》與杜馬斯其他里程碑之作風格大相徑庭，蘊藉著更豐富的意涵，如1990年的《第一人類（I-IV）》、《黑色素描》（1991-1992年作）及《畫家》（1994年作）。這種分別在畫作的用色中尤為明顯——本作採用大片混合均勻而濃厚的灰啞色調，與早前《嬰兒》的暗黃色調截然不同，而這種運色技巧可追溯自杜馬斯童年時所遭受的種族歧視經歷。引用藝術家的話，這是一幅「視黑色為一種積極的表態、向這種美麗色彩致敬的作品」。《嬰兒2》曾於2007年東京都現代美術館舉辦的「瑪琳・杜馬斯：蒼白」展覽上展出，足證這幅作品的地位。此畫懸掛在杜馬斯的其他重要肖像作品旁邊，其中最知名的作品可數1984年的自畫像傑作《邪惡是平庸的》。本作筆觸瀟灑、耐人尋味，不僅是一幅優秀的當代肖像畫，更是杜馬斯探討種族、歷史與人類生存基本原則的動人作品。

杜馬斯1953年生於南非，憑藉卓越的藝術天賦，創造出廣獲好評的肖像佳作。杜馬斯以與別不同的微妙視角，剖析人類生存現況的不同面向。縱觀其成就斐然的職業生涯，杜馬斯一直致力探討生與死、性與性別、邪惡與平庸等話題。1976年，杜馬斯逃離南非的種族隔離制度，遠赴阿姆斯特丹繼續研究藝術。多年來，杜馬斯一直以自願流亡的海外人士身份創作，這種流徙經歷促使她的作品流露出一種強烈的疏離感。杜馬斯對種族隔離意識形態的反抗，為她帶來多方面啟發，驅使杜馬斯在作品中孜孜不倦地向具有歧視色彩的二元概念提出質詢。黑與白、美與醜、好與壞，這些對立概念正是杜馬斯的創作精髓。1995年，杜馬斯代表荷蘭出席威尼斯雙年展，奠定了她作為全荷蘭最受國際讚譽的藝術家的地位。2014年，阿姆斯特丹市立博物館為杜馬斯籌劃了一場盛大的回顧展「圖像的負累」（The Image as Burden），展出的作品隨後分別在倫敦泰特現代藝術館和瑞士貝耶勒基金會博物館巡迴展出。藝評家形容杜馬斯的作品「兼具藝術性與挑釁性」，並言：「觀者可見作品的繪畫方式和主題——前者靈動流麗，半透明的油彩斑痕沉落畫面深處，一撇一捺如行雲流水，功架十足；後者則往往與人性、脆弱、暴力、苦難及死亡相關」（勞拉・卡明撰，〈瑪琳・杜馬斯：「圖像的負累」展評——藝術性與挑釁性〉，《衛報》，2015年2月8日）。

嬰兒是杜馬斯創作裡的核心主題。《嬰兒》在1985年面世，1989年杜馬斯誕下一女，隨後創作了更多以嬰兒及孩童為題的作品。《第一人類（I-IV）》作於1990年，其靈感主要來自杜馬斯的女兒和友人兒子的相片。這些畫作尺幅龐大，道出了初為人母的龐大壓力，以及由此而生的一切關於美麗、迷戀、擔憂和恐懼的矛盾感受。「世間萬物都是矛盾的。這個原理比任何一切更能道出事物的本質」（引述自藝術家，馬蒂亞斯・溫岑撰，〈年輕女性藝術家的畫像〉，《瑪琳・杜馬斯：女性》展覽圖錄，巴登・巴登國家美術館，2005年，頁36）。自1990年代起，杜馬斯著手創作具政治動機的作品，如1991至1992年面世的《黑色素描》。這幅畫描繪一個巨大的網格，中間佈滿逾百個黑人頭像的墨水素描。這幅特寫肖像由一個個獨立頭像組成，以孤立分離的焦點為基礎，令每個人物肖像均顯得莊嚴而憂鬱。杜馬斯的獨特視覺語彙啟發自歐洲存在主義畫家如愛德華・孟克及弗朗西斯・培根，並與藝術史上經久不衰的創作體裁——肖像畫開展持續對話，毫不忌諱地刻畫出當代歷史上至今仍縈繞不散的噩夢。此外，杜馬斯不從照片或現成圖片中取材，規避了傳統學術派的人體寫生手法，而是將圖像重新演繹，重構了現今世代的圖像消費習慣。正如藝術家本人所言：「我處理的是二手圖像和一手經驗」（引述自藝術家，馬里斯卡・凡・登・伯格，《甜言蜜語》，阿姆斯特丹，1998年，頁24）。談及以孩童為題的作品，杜馬斯曾說了一句充滿爭議性的話：「這不是一個小孩，這是一幅畫」（引述自藝術家與芭芭拉・布魯姆的訪談，刊於《瑪琳・杜馬斯》，多米尼克・德・布格德/芭芭拉·布魯姆/瑪魯奇亞·凱塞狄奧/馬琳·杜馬斯，倫敦，1999年，頁21）。杜馬斯在作品中表現繪畫圖像的不確定性，藉此向觀眾展示這種媒材的當代意義，成功躋身同時代最傑出具象畫家的行列。