Connie Butler: In the early 1930s, the American artist Man Ray made a photograph called Tears, a close-up of a woman’s face with clear glass beads below her eyes. Glass Tears is one of Dumas’ most recent paintings and makes explicit her ongoing fascination with photography as both a process, a history and a subject.
Marlene Dumas: I had this book on crying, the cultural history of tears, they called this image by Man Ray, the prototypical example of modernist tears. And so then I used that as a source.
It also becomes a challenge to see, when have tears been painted the last time that you really were touched by it in a painting?
If you don’t look at the work very well, you will think, oh my goodness, she just repainted or imitated or copied his photograph. But actually what I think works very well for me, as a painting, was that although there is this reference to the photographic aspects and the tears, the background was made by throwing little drops of water, in a certain gesture across the small canvas.
And so for me in the end, it has become actually an image made up of different gestures and different styles that come together. A painting is, for me, not only an image I’m very much aware that it’s a physical object. I also don’t really care so much how people look like. But I need them. It is this mixture of the physical and the metaphysical, in a sense, that I want.