THE CYCLADIC MUSEUM PRESENTS: MARLENE DUMAS – CYCLADIC BLUES

A rare selection of works by Marlene Dumas is currently on view in the atmospheric setting of the old mansion at the Cycladic Museum in Athens. The exhibition, though not a retrospective, gathers some of the most powerful pieces from across her career  from the early ’90s to as recently as January 2025 “Paint is still wet” the curator Douglas Fogle says..

Dumas’s world is one of ambiguity and intensity. Identity, eroticism, memory, and mortality surface again and again  sometimes tender, sometimes brutal. Two monumental paintings made on site seem to echo the house itself: looping silhouettes, spectral bodies, quiet drama. The atmosphere is intimate, melancholic, meditative.

Blue recurs, as mood, as music, as memory. Faces flicker between mask and soul. A suite of 17 drawings reads like a storyboard for a film never made, full of longing, revenge, aging, and self-revelation.

It’s not about sex, but about memory of eroticism. Not about death, but about what it means to live with the knowledge of it. In Dumas’s hands, painting becomes a kind of haunting a way to think through the body, through time, through feeling.