Empty Handed 1991

Marlene Dumas’s painting “Empty Handed” feels like it was built from shifting layers of oil paint, a sort of palimpsest of searching and finding. The colours are muted but alive: blues, greens, and fleshy pinks. It's easy to imagine Dumas wrestling with the figure and its pose. I can almost feel the artist's hand moving, adding, scraping, and smudging the paint, trying to get it right. The hands are the focal point, but they’re also the most unresolved part of the painting. Is the child undressing? Or just fiddling? The uncertainty makes the image so affecting, almost as if we're seeing into a moment of private introspection. Dumas often works from photographs, but it's more than mere reproduction: she finds something deeper within herself. Like other figurative painters, such as Alice Neel or Nicole Eisenman, Dumas uses paint to uncover something of the human condition: messy, incomplete, and always in process. In the studio, we’re all empty-handed at first. It’s about what emerges through the act of painting.