Bridging Eras: Marlene Dumas’ Cycladic Blues at the Museum of Cycladic Art

The Museum of Cycladic Art is pleased to present the exhibition Marlene Dumas: Cycladic Blues, Dumas’ first solo museum exhibition in Greece, running from 5 June through 3 November 2025. The exhibition will consist of more than thirty paintings and works on paper by Marlene Dumas, one of the most influential artists of our times, displayed in dialogue with antiquities from the Museum’s permanent collection in the Stathatos Mansion, the Museum’s neoclassical wing.

Curated by independent curator Douglas Fogle in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition will bring together works spanning the past twenty years of Dumas’ practice alongside newly completed paintings, thus offering a cross section of the artist’s eerily beautiful and challenging representations of the human body. For this exhibition, Dumas has personally selected works from her oeuvre, and created new works, in direct response to the histories of figuration that she explored within the Museum of Cycladic Art’s archaeological collections. Moreover, in a rare occurrence, Dumas has also hand-selected a group of archaeological objects from the Museum’s collection that will feature in the exhibition.

As curator Douglas Fogle has stated: “Βοth mute and loquacious, the bodies that haunt Dumas’s canvases engage in an anachronistic pas de deux with the abstracted human forms of the Cycladic figurines created by unknown artists some five thousand years ago”.

One of the most distinctive voices in contemporary art, South-African-born, Amsterdam-based Marlene Dumas (b. 1953, Cape Town) has radically expanded the vocabulary of painting. Many of Dumas’s works emerge from her substantial archive of images, which covers everything from art history to mass media and personal photographs. Drawing upon a range of different traditions, from the gestural language of expressionism to the critical distance of conceptual art, she reclaims different images, transforming them into vibrant, spectral presences. Her fearless gaze absorbs everything with equal intensity, yet her work always returns to the pleasures of looking.

Her works have been included in solo and group exhibitions in many museums across the world including MoMA, New York City; Tate Modern, London; Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.