Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave
Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Marlene Dumas is an icon of feminist art, said Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times. Her paintings don’t shy from exploring issues of gender, power, and violence, “in pictures derived from pornography” or, in one case, from images of Marilyn Monroe’s autopsy. Yet this retrospective at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art suggests that what truly sets apart her work is its philosophical depth. Death is a major theme in all Dumas’ paintings. The somnolent young girl in Reinhardt’s Daughter, for instance, looks so “black and bruised” that she seems to be a corpse, and the mortality-soaked mood of such canvases calls to mind masters such as Goya and Manet. “Talk about ambition!” Her painting techniques, as well, engage with major (male) painters in the European tradition. Measuring Your Own Grave (2003) “looks to nothing less than Leonardo da Vinci.” Her contorted figure, arms extended out to the edge of the frame, is a moody twist on his elegant and rationally proportioned Vitruvian Man.
The painting achieves its effect through a clever optical trick, said Christopher Miles in the LA Weekly. At first glance, the central figure seems to be sitting on a background split horizontally between black and white. But the image also can be seen another way, “with the bottom half of the canvas becoming a ground plane upon which the figure stands, bent over at the waist.” This simple painting delivers a punch to the gut more effectively than Dumas’ more overtly shocking images. As in all her best works, the painter’s lively brush relieves the morbidness of her subjects with “a kind of sideways exuberance, a tarnished joie de vivre.” These contradictory tendencies make her retrospective an unforgettable cocktail of “pleasure and disturbance.”
-
Freakier Friday: Lohan and Curtis reunite for 'uneven' but 'endearing' sequelThe Week Recommends Mother-and-daughter comedy returns with four characters switching bodies
-
Al fresco art: the UK's best sculpture parksThe Week Recommends Soak up the scenery with a stroll through these open-air galleries
-
Codeword: August 14, 2025The Week's daily codeword puzzle
-
If/Thenfeature Tony-winning Idina Menzel “looks and sounds sensational” in a role tailored to her talents.
-
Rocky
feature It’s a wonder that this Rocky ever reaches the top of the steps.
-
Love and Information
feature Leave it to Caryl Churchill to create a play that “so ingeniously mirrors our age of the splintered attention span.”
-
The Bridges of Madison County
feature Jason Robert Brown’s “richly melodic” score is “one of Broadway’s best in the last decade.”
-
Outside Mullingar
feature John Patrick Shanley’s “charmer of a play” isn’t for cynics.
-
The Night Alive
feature Conor McPherson “has a singular gift for making the ordinary glow with an extra dimension.”
-
No Man’s Land
feature The futility of all conversation has been, paradoxically, the subject of “some of the best dialogue ever written.”
-
The Commons of Pensacola
feature Stage and screen actress Amanda Peet's playwriting debut is a “witty and affecting” domestic drama.