Marlene Dumas’ charged, exposed and intimate figures gather in Athens

‘Death is an evil. We have the gods' word for it; they too would die if death were a good thing.’ South African artist Marlene Dumas reads this poem attributed to the Ancient Greek poet Sappho, outside her exhibition ‘Cycladic Blues’, taking place across the neoclassical Stathatos Mansion in the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens. The poem cuts across time, framing death not as a transition to the next cycle of life, but as a failure – an affront even to the divine – and asserting its finality and violence. With this, Dumas sets the tone for ‘Cycladic Blues’, a deeply personal and expansive exhibition that moves through the many cycles that preoccupy her work: sex and desire, love and hate, life and death, guilt and innocence. The show draws connections between Dumas’ paintings, works on paper, and Cycladic and Hellenistic artefacts selected by the artist – some more than 4,000 years old – from the museum's permanent collection.

The majority of the ancient objects placed in dialogue with Dumas’ works – ranging from early pieces made in 1992 to new paintings created specifically for this exhibition – are Cycladic figurines. Carved from marble and originating from the nearby Cycladic islands, the figurines exude an eerie anonymity. Little is known about them with certainty; they were likely placed in graves and it is assumed they played a role in funerary rituals.

Their minimal, stylised forms – with folded arms, curved and smoothed-over features, and precisely incised lines marking sex and limbs – are a delicate abstraction of the human body, one that resonates with Dumas’ visual language. The ancient figures now stand in quiet proximity to her paintings, which chart the body in its most charged, exposed and intimate states. From the strip-club dancers portrayed in her Amsterdam series to martyrs, murderers and tender portraits of her daughter, Helena (1992), Dumas’ figures are consistently performing, ageing, desiring, or dying. The exhibition becomes not only a confrontation with death, but a meditation on how we face death, through the persistence of bodies, the repetition of ideals or gestures, and the act of image-making itself, in a dialogue that cycles across centuries.

The artist's relationship to Greek antiquity is shaped by conflict. Raised in Apartheid-era South Africa, Dumas witnessed how classical ideals were weaponised by fascist and colonial regimes to uphold order and supremacy. In that context, the smooth, idealised body of antiquity became a political tool. It was only later that she recognised the subversive potential buried within those same classical texts. On Robben Island, political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela, staged and acted Greek tragedies, in acts of camaraderie and survival. In Sophocles’ Antigone, for instance, the prisoners saw a story of moral defiance against state violence. Greek antiquity, for Dumas, thus becomes a paradox: one in which traditional beauty is entangled with brutality.

This tension runs throughout her work. Dumas returns obsessively to death, not as a singular event, but as a persistent cycle that binds all things. In 50+ (2010–2018), painted over eight years and after her 50th birthday, the body is depicted as something already fading. Veins pulsate beneath a translucent skin, as a second face hovers like a spirit leaving the body. Dumas’ process is as much about erasure as depiction; in the studio, as she works, she removes more paint from the canvas surface than she builds. In Long Neck (Fragment) (c. 1998), ink pools and bleeds into paper, forming a dissolving, incomplete body. Her starting points are often photographs, many of them marked by violence and post-mortem images, including that of the young Chechen woman from the Moscow theatre crisis in Alfa (2004). A cropped image of a female’s side profile fades to a milky grey haze, her mouth softly ajar, and her eyes closed in what could be sleep, or deathly slumber.

The tension between presence and absence, eroticism and grief, is heightened in Immaculate, a close-up painting of a lower torso and vagina; the skin of the unknown figure is blue beside the lower torso of a Cycladic figurine. The effect is quiet but charged. Dumas’ painting invites the gaze, in an intimate, vulnerable and fleshy way, whilst the marble figurine, detached from its funerary origin, stands cold and symbolic of the transition to the next cycle in life. Their proximity does not resolve into harmony; rather, they orbit each other in a dialogue of opposites. One speaks to desire and immediacy, the other to departure. But in that friction lies the power of ‘Cycladic Blues’: a refusal to idealise the body as fixed to one state. Rather, the body constantly has the capacity to transform and change, to slip between desire and decay, intimacy and distance, past and present.

The conversation between Dumas’ paintings and the Cycladic figurines is neither seamless nor reconciled, and it is in this friction that gives the exhibition its charge. The Cycladic islands, from which the ancient figurines originate, take their name from the Greek word kyklos (meaning ‘circle’), a reference to how the islands encircle the sacred island of Delos, mythic birthplace of Apollo and Artemis. But the term also evokes larger, more existential cycles: birth and death, memory and forgetting, creation and decay; the very cycles that animate Dumas’ work.

The figurines, with their smoothed limbs and closed forms, speak to the cyclical nature of ritual and mourning. And yet, both ancient and contemporary bodies resist realism, preferring distortion and abstraction as ways of reaching what lies beneath the surface. Their connection lies in the rhythm of recurrence in how form returns in different guises, and how death persistently haunts life.

‘Marlene Dumas: Cycladic Blues’ at the Museum of Cycladic Art until 2 November 2025, cycladic.gr/en