The painter Marlene Dumas has transformed the way we see the world, writes Deborah Nicholls-Lee, as two new exhibitions of her work open.
A child smeared in paint lingers sheepishly in the foreground of a stark white canvas. The aftermath of an unsupervised art session is a recognisable image of family life, but in The Painter (1994) by Marlene Dumas, the girl's sinister stare and blood-coloured hands disrupt the trope, taking us somewhere darker.
Perhaps the painter in the title is in fact Dumas, engaged in what she calls "the power struggle between the artist and subjects", and her daughter – the painting's focus – merely an accessory to broader questions of innocence and identity. "Art is not a mirror," Dumas has said, writing that "a good work of art is essentially elusive". In a ground-breaking departure from the conventions of portrait painting, feelings, rather than fixed representations, dominate.
A decade earlier, with self-portrait Evil is Banal, Dumas interrogated her own duplicity as a white girl brought up in South Africa under apartheid. In this portrait, a black-stained hand and face, within an otherwise peaceful pose, explores the symbolism of the light-dark dichotomy, and suggests a malign complicity contained in the outwardly ordinary. Later, the scarred face in The White Disease (1985) would provide an even bleaker evocation of the moral decay of the apartheid regime and its disfiguring of her homeland.
Leaving South Africa behind and moving to Amsterdam in 1976 afforded Dumas tremendous artistic freedom. She could wander the city in relative safety, see masterpieces close up, and there was easy access to pop culture and media − the basis, no doubt, for the collages that formed part of her early work.