Marlene Dumas

Dumas paints faces and bodies in loose, watery washes, and the looseness is what makes them unsettling: features dissolve just as you think you have read them. Born in Cape Town in 1953, she left South Africa for the Netherlands in the 1970s and represented the Dutch at the Venice Biennale in 1995, so she belongs to two art histories at once. The single best place to see her now is the Louvre in Paris, where the museum invited her to make Liaisons, a series of nine paintings for the great wall of the Porte des Lions atrium, on view since December 2025. Amsterdam's Stedelijk also keeps her work in its collection displays.