The Body Politic: Gorgeous and Grotesque

These are just extracts from the larger New York Times Article that can be found here:

Ms. Dumas’s work tends to aim for the solar plexus, as the show’s morbid title suggests. Fusing the political and the painterly, it grapples with the complexities of image making, the human soul, sexuality, the beauty of art, the masculinity of traditional painting, the ugliness of social oppression. How much it delivers on these scores is a question that this exhibition doesn’t quite answer.

The show suggests that while this amply talented artist has created some riveting images, her work becomes monotonous and obvious when seen in bulk.

Striking abbreviations and fuzzy blurs make us look twice. Is that woman asleep or dead? Has that naked child been playing with red paint or is that blood on its hands? In many instances such doubts keep you moving between the harsh, suggestive imagery and the brushwork and process, but after a while you may begin to feel a bit manipulated.

Close-ups of breasts and the female pudenda from 1972 bring to mind both Eva Hesse’s sexually charged abstractions and Joan Semmel’s monumental views of entwined naked couples. They could also be simply a young artist’s record of her changing body.

At times her career — including her work and her voluble persona — seems like an extended Conceptual Art project intended to turn painting and its maleness on its head. Yet it is framed in a familiar artistic ego and bluster.

Still, one viewer’s stasis could be another’s relentless perseverance. Ms. Dumas’s emphasis on the naked or otherwise vulnerable bodies of women can read as retribution for centuries of less attuned representations by men and also for the supposed neutrality of abstraction.

Some of her works protect women by making them disembodied, cloaking them in abstraction. The abject female of “Magdalena (Out of Eggs, Out of Business)” is little more than a few cursory features and two knee-length strands of hair enveloped in a Rothko-like field of dark red. Yet she doesn’t convince that this approach is all that different from that of Munch.

Ms. Dumas’s best work may lie ahead, and in the direction of greater variety. A model is Louise Bourgeois, whose recurring feminist themes have been presented in a succession of markedly different forms. There are hopeful signs in recent works like the “Moshekwa” portrait (2006); the frowsy, Nan Goldin-ish “Self-Portrait at Noon” from this year; and “Immaculate” (2003).

The question or rather larger issue that comes to my mind is how you extend your oeuvre, while remaining true to your theme and philosophy but making it appear less one-dimensional.