The Edge

‘Painting is about the trace of the human touch. It is about the skin of a surface.’ - Marlene Dumas

Painted in 1991, The Edge is an enigmatic example of Marlene Dumas’ figurative practice. Isolated against an empty shoreline, a lone girl crouches, her face turned away from the viewer. Thin, fluid streaks of paint trace her limbs, whilst fiery ribbons of red and orange demarcate her dress; sand slips through her fingers to the water below. Purposefully divorced from specific context, the work demonstrates Dumas’ ability to conjure rich psychological drama from restrained painterly means. Working primarily from secondary images – including film stills, newspaper and magazine photographs and art historical reproductions – the artist paints quickly and intuitively, attempting to distil the private emotions of her subjects. Many, such as the present, have their backs turned, conjuring a disquieting sense of voyeuristic unease in the viewer. Though stripped of all external narrative, and frequently blurred the point of abstraction, they appear like fragments from a half-told story, shrouded in mystery and suspense. Despite its characteristic ambiguity, the present work’s title seems to hint at the peripheral, liminal zone occupied by these creatures. The painting was included in the artist’s major touring exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven in 1992, and this year featured in the joint show Moonrise: Marlene Dumas & Edvard Munch at the Munch Museet, Oslo.
Born in South Africa in 1953, Dumas moved to Amsterdam in 1976, and has lived and worked in the city ever since. She came to prominence in the mid-1980s, and by the 1990s had achieved international recognition, representing the Netherlands at the 1995 Venice Biennale. Drawing upon her youth under Apartheid, her practice frequently addresses issues relating to identity and oppression, as well as exploring themes of female sexuality. At its heart, however, her work stages a profound enquiry into the nature of imagery, interrogating paint’s ability to create traces of the human world. ‘I am also aware of the differences between human beings and artificial images’, she explains. ‘That oil and paint, not flesh and blood, run through their veins. My figures know that too. And like fallen angels do they blame me (and you) for creating them to exist in the land of abstraction – called art’ (M. Dumas, ‘Naked Bodies’, 1988, reproduced in M. van den Berg (ed.), Marlene Dumas: Sweet Nothings. Notes and Texts, London 2014, p. 47). Silent and brooding, her figures take on a haunting, dreamlike quality, suspended like trapped specimens in a painterly laboratory. In this regard, the parallel with Munch is apt: her subjects, like those of her forebear, are victims of their own condition.