An early masterpiece by Marlene Dumas, Losing (Her Meaning), 1988, draws the viewer into an ethereal scene beautifully painted in a sumptuous palette of moody blues and greens. A nude female fgure foats in a pool of water, her luminescent body refracted in the dark waters as if illuminated by the moon. Painted in 1988, Dumas conceived of this work in tandem with Waiting (for Meaning) for her first international solo museum show at the Kunsthalle zu Kiel. Highlighted on back and front cover of the exhibition catalogue, respectively, these two paintings are widely celebrated as setting the conceptual and formal foundation for the discrete series of paintings of reclining female nudes that includes Snowwhite and the Next Generation, Centraal Museum, Utrecht, Snowwhite and the Broken Arm, Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, and The Ritual, Musées de la Ville de Strasbourg. While Waiting (for Meaning) entered the collection of the Kunsthalle zu Kiel, the present work was acquired by Dumas’s fellow artist and close friend Erik Andriesse. Remaining in the same family collection since his passing in 1993, Losing (Her Meaning) has been included in all major Dumas exhibitions in the past three decades – from Documenta 9 and her seminal Miss Interpreted solo show at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven in 1992, to, most recently, The Image as Burden, which travelled from the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, to Tate Modern, London, and The Beyeler Foundation, Basel, in 2014-2015.
When Dumas created the present work for her 1988 exhibition at the Kunsthalle zu Kiel, she had established herself as one of the leading post-conceptual painters in Europe alongside artists such as René Daniëls, Erik Andriesse and Luc Tuymans. It was in 1985 that Dumas triumphantly returned to painting afer a fve-year hiatus, developing a complex approach to fgurative painting that took as a starting point her visual archive of art historical reproductions, news clippings, and photographic imagery. While Dumas based Waiting (For Meaning) on a 1970s photograph by David Hamilton depicting a female nude outstretched languorously on a bed, for the present work she took as a point of departure an image of a woman snorkeling from a thrif store nudist magazine, which her gallerist Paul Andriesse had gifed to Dumas for her archive. Transformative rather than mimetic, Dumas’s process of painting exploits the physicality of paint to undermine the photographic source material. Like her predecessor Edvard Munch, Dumas relishes in the materiality of painting; here, she liberally layers paint to evoke the depth and darkness of the sea, while simultaneously covering the ground with loose brushstrokes, allowing for areas of the canvas to remain exposed. ‘I especially admire in Munch that each brushstroke can be traced,’ Dumas has written.
Marlene Dumas, Waiting (for Meaning), 1988, oil on canvas. © Marlene Dumas.