We can speak more of a perspective than a retrospective: the life and art of Marlene Dumas (Cape Town, South Africa, 1953) are told in a crude and at the same time shared representation of the human body. The Palazzo Grassi exhibition Open-end, curated by Marlene Dumas herself and Caroline Bourgeois, displays one hundred paintings, including her latest works, which dialogue with each other through the different rooms going from death to life, from despair to love and kiss, from innocence to guilt, from violence to tenderness … Everything is played on a duality made possible also by the size of the paintings themselves, which rhythmically alternate different and always open perspectives, turning the exhibition into poetry according to the definition given by the artist herself: «Poetry is a writing that breathes and makes leaps, and that leaves open spaces which allow us to read between the lines».

We can feel the presence of the artist next to each painting underlining that the meaning of the painting goes beyond the image itself. In fact it is linked to the painting next to it and to the following one, in a continuous vital flow, where the end is always open just as the title of the exhibition says. “In my eyes Marlene Dumas is an artist exploring our ghosts, such as the history and body traces, the endless use of bodies. Her work invites us to be more “true”. Her “liquid” and physical way of painting, where the subject appear only through brushstrokes without any prior drawing, makes her works seductive and mysterious, just like vital apparitions». (Caroline Bourgeois)