“The eye must travel,” said fashion editor Diana Vreeland — in this case to Athens, where the Museum of Cycladic Art hosts “Marlene Dumas: Cycladic Blues”, the South African-born, Amsterdam-based painter’s first solo museum exhibition in Greece. Running until November 2, it stages an extraordinary dialogue between Dumas’ deeply expressive canvases and the serene timelessness of Cycladic antiquities that predate the classical world.
Dumas is widely considered one of the most influential artists of her generation and, significantly, the highest-selling woman artist at auction worldwide. She shattered a world auction record in May 2025 when her 1997 painting Miss January sold for more than $13m (R225.45m), making it the most expensive work by a living female artist and attesting to her continued significance.
Her raw painterly language has shaped contemporary figurative art for decades. Her portraits of faces and bodies, ghostlike yet sensual, meditate on desire, mortality, identity and the uneasy beauty of human vulnerability in simple forms that resonate with these ancient works.
Curated by Douglas Fogle in collaboration with the artist, the exhibition gathers more than 40 paintings and drawings spanning three decades, with two monumental new works — Old and Phantom Age (both 2025) — created especially for Athens. Installed in the neoclassical elegance of the Stathatos Mansion, these works vibrate against the spare, enigmatic beauty of 14 Cycladic and classical figurines, vessels and marble idols selected from the museum’s collection.
This juxtaposition, rare in Dumas’ career, underlines her fascination with time and transience. Her emotionally charged brushstrokes, with their washes of ink-like colour and haunting distortions, find unexpected kinship with the minimal, schematic abstraction of Cycladic sculpture. The exchange between contemporary figuration and prehistoric form is not harmonious so much as provocative: a reminder that the human condition — its erotic charge, its melancholy, its fragility — has always sought representation across centuries and civilisations.
For Athens, the exhibition is more than a display of international contemporary art; it is a landmark encounter between past and present, between antiquity and one of the most evocative contemporary painters of flesh and spirit. Dumas has remarked on the liberating timelessness of the Cycladic idols, which “seem freed from our human prejudices”. In their company, her canvases appear vulnerable and commanding, as though stripped down to the essence of what it means to be alive.
“Cycladic Blues” thus affirms Dumas’ singular status: at once the market’s record-breaking woman artist and, more profoundly, a relentless chronicler of humanity’s search for form, meaning and memory.
From the September edition of Wanted, 2025
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