The new Marlene Dumas retrospective at MOMA (her first mid-career retrospective State-side!) is an exhibit that should not be missed. Measuring Your Own Grave beautifully articulates Dumas' fearlessness in depicting the exquisit shock of an infant after birth, the tension of a pre-pubescent child, the hanging, flabby chin-flesh of a grandmother and the even the dead. The exhibit is woven together along loose thematic lines from topics on race relations and family psychology to terror. With a nod towards Expressionism's broad brush-strokes and abstraction, all within a framework of stark realism, we peer into a world of the anonymous, raw, violent yet beautiful faces and figures each one a commentary on society, history, politics and pyschology. Each canvas is a representation of individuals-- or really, they are of bodies and souls as they move through, and encounter events and incidents of art, life and politics. We don't ask who the figures are, but are more concerned with what they represent in our society. Marlene Dumas was born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1953 but since the age of 23, she has been living and working in Amsterdam.
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