“I fell in love with a woman in one of the paintings and went to visit her every week,” Nan Goldin tells us in Stendhal Syndrome (2024). Naturally, we can fall in love with art. We desire it, want to see it, perhaps touch it, maybe acquire it, live with it. We can be deeply moved by art, but we can also be truly overwhelmed by it: that mysterious experience for which words seem barely adequate.

During his trip to Italy in 1817, when he stopped in Florence, Stendhal was weighed down by too much art. “I had reached that point of emotion,” he writes, “where the heavenly sensation given by the Fine Arts meets passionate feelings.” When he left Santa Croce, his heart was racing, and he felt drained, walking with a fear of falling. Was Stendhal’s sensitivity affected by Leonardo’s melancholy, Correggio’s chiaroscuro, Michelangelo’s monumentality, or perhaps violence, Bronzino’s nude, or Duccio’s lyricism? Whatever the cause, the splendour and magnificence of art can hypnotise viewers to the point of physical symptoms such as dizziness and fierce palpitations.

Goldin recounts that she once had a similar experience. Alone in the Musée du Louvre, where she photographed hundreds of its masterpieces, she encountered powerful sensations. Surprised by them, she tried to understand their nature. “It was defined to me as scopophilia, intense desire fulfilled through looking,” she tells us. The pleasure of looking, from the Greek terms scopos, to look, and philia, fondness or love towards an object, led her to explore this feeling in Scopophilia (2011), where “art merges with impassioned sensual emotion” and where the viewer can attain ecstasy through looking. But Goldin wanted to probe further the overpowering sensations art can provoke, explaining that Stendhal syndrome can be both an aesthetic and an ecstatic experience: a complex response to observing art. Hence this new work from 2024.

Just as Ovid’s Metamorphoses tells us of “bodies changed to other forms,” Goldin presents a similar yet different story about the possible forms a body can take, asking this time what Ovid never did: whose body is it, and how many metamorphoses has it undergone? In Stendhal Syndrome, mythological figures such asPygmalion, Cupid, Narcissus, Diana, Hermaphroditus, and Orpheus, alongside other artistic depictions, alternate with images of people and places from Goldin’s own life. The result is a continuum of images spanning oil paintings, sculpture, portraiture, and real-life snapshots. Goldin suppresses the distinction between art and life, and, as a participant-observer, she opens up the condition of visuality through the possibility of incidental photography. Her photographs bear traces of classical art—composition, colour, and form—and show how different bodies can occupy the same representational space.

We hear the artist’s voiceover, delivered in an even cadence, as she tells us how she visited the woman depicted in one of the paintings every week. Among the images, Pierre-Narcisse Guérin’s Portrait of a Young Girl appears on screen for a few seconds, followed by snapshots of her friends.

We might even perceive similarities between Guérin’s androgynous figure and one of Goldin’s friends. Through her narration, she recounts how, while in the museum, she recognised the faces of her friends in the paintings. “Stendhal,” she says, “spoke of paintings as a surface for the imagination to complete.” When we see images of mythological figures, saints, or royal portraiture, we find resemblances to images of unknown people. Whether these similarities are real or imagined does not matter. What matters is the effect art has on us, and how, in seeing art, we may come to understand ourselves and our communities differently.

The mythic sculptor Pygmalion learned this lesson the hard way. Intoxicated by his own genius, he somehow discarded people, especially women, whom, as Goldin points out, he even hated. Obsessed with his art and convinced that it would suffice, he wanted to keep art and life separate. But his callous egotism met reality the moment he fell madly in love with his statue and desperately tried to breathe life into it. After all, his creative power, his artifice, was inert without the presence of a goddess, and his cold intellect proved short-lived once he discovered he had a heart capable of feeling and of being wounded.

If seeing too much art can make us ill, perhaps giving us a headache or even Stendhal syndrome, the reverse is also true. Some art has the potential to heal us. Healing is not the same as curing, which belongs to science and medicine. Healing is about restoring a fuller version of ourselves, opening a different way of seeing, or discovering the joy of creating something new, whether that be a photograph, a painting, or even a deeper articulation of our humanity.

Goldin’s art insists on our shared humanity. Her oeuvre is concerned with stories of many lives, both present and lost, and presents a multitude of voices and identities that resist reduction to simplistic political discourse. Her long-overdue retrospective in France, This Will Not End Well, is currently held at the Grand Palais and takes visitors on a journey into the intimate space of five fabric rooms designed by the architect Hala Wardé. Curated by Fredrik Liew, the exhibition features four of Goldin’s slide shows, including The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and Stendhal Syndrome, the short film Sirenes (2019–2020), and the multimedia installation Sister, Saints, Sibyls (2004–2022), on view at the Chapelle Saint-Louis at the Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière. In this last piece, Goldin tells the story of her sister Barbara, who died by suicide at 18. Barbara was expected to conform to certain norms, but when she failed to do so, her parents, on the pretence that she was rebellious and sexually wayward as a teenager, had her institutionalised on repeated occasions. At what cost? A devastating loss.

Loss is a recurring theme in Goldin’s oeuvre. In Memory Lost (2019–2021), she presents the devastating effects of addiction, emphasising the emotional confusion and hallucinatory symptoms of drug intoxication. The piece creates a sense of altered reality, a dark lament in which fear, hope, confusion, and desperation mingle, leaving a persistent afterimage that questions the nature of memory.

Goldin spiralled into opioid addiction after being prescribed OxyContin in 2010 following surgery. In response, she founded P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), an activist collective that aimed to hold the Sackler family accountable for commodifying and profiting from pain. Her art shows how governments and private organisations can operate through discriminatory abstraction that has real and harmful effects on people’s lives and bodies. For this piece, Mica Levi composed an evocative soundtrack, performed alongside music by Soundwalk Collective, Eartha Kitt, and Franz Schubert.

Sirenes (2019–2020), a companion piece to Memory Lost, shows how drugs can induce pleasure and even sensuality in an age of utter fragmentation and isolation. Goldin draws on 30 films, including Drunken Angel (1948) by Akira Kurosawa, White Nights (1957) by Luchino Visconti, Screen Tests (1964–66) by Andy Warhol, and Satyricon (1969) by Federico Fellini. The piece raises questions about what it means for an artist to use other people’s art as found footage and what it means to exist on, or inhabit, a screen. Here, the readymade is not created from scratch but chosen: an act of empowerment that connects past and present. Once again, Mica Levi composed the score, a whistling, haptic sound that conveys the lure of addiction, much as the sirens of Greek mythology tempted sailors towards destruction.

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981–2022) records a lost world, but one that still feels close, because nothing is more human than love, relationships, break-ups, uncertainty, precarity, violence, and death. With a title drawn from Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera (1928), The Ballad has been continually updated and edited into a slideshow. The work comprises Goldin’s photographs from the 1970s through to the 1990s, accompanied by various soundtracks featuring Maria Callas, Petula Clark, Yoko Ono, and the Velvet Underground.

Goldin once referred to The Ballad as “the diary I let people read. […] These pictures come out of relationships, not observation.” Her camera recorded some of the most intimate moments, including sex scenes with her partner Brian. Using her Nikon camera, she photographed her friends, showing their beauty, strengths, and vulnerabilities. Unvarnished images of unknown people blend with glimpses of artists such as Andy Warhol and Keith Haring. The relationship between viewer and image creates a sense of inclusion, bringing private moments—sex, showering, sleeping, eating, dancing, even death—into public view. Goldin’s work also shows experiences such as childbirth, a possible abortion, a scar from an ectopic pregnancy, and her own bruised eyes after violence from her ex-partner. These moments reflect the physical reality of being human through our shared condition: birth and growth, emotion and desire, suffering and conflict, freedom and choice, love and death.

Goldin’s art creates space for many images, voices, bodies, and perspectives, showing that reality cannot be contained within rigid language or a single normative viewpoint. The possible forms a body can take are endless and should be imagined and reimagined, not repeated, replaced, forced, fixed, or ranked. Most of us, if not all, want to see ourselves as whole and complete. Goldin’s practice, then, becomes a beckoning mirror: a place of plurality and resistance to any attempt to standardise or erase these multiple embodied experiences.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Give this playlist a listen: Nan Goldin — This Will Not End Well

As always, thank you for reading—

A.

The exhibition Nan Goldin, This Will Not End Well, at Grand Palais, in Paris is on view until June 21, 2026.

In the 1920s, in the fashionable Parisian cafés of the Left Bank like Le Dôme and La Coupole, one could encounter artists and writers from across the world. Hemingway, Man Ray, Picasso, Radiguet, Zadkine, Dos Passos and Calder were regulars of the city’s cosmopolitan intellectual life. Among them stood an elegant Japanese man with a distinct public image, instantly recognisable by his bowl haircut, sharply cut fringe, and round, black-rimmed spectacles. His notoriety was amplified not only by the garments and accessories he wore but also by his flamboyance and unconventionality. This was the artist Tsuguharu Foujita, known simply as Foujita.

Born in Tokyo in 1886 into a samurai family, Tsuguharu Foujita, whose name means ‘heir of peace,’ spent most of his life in Paris. He was an artist at the intersection of many worlds and contradictions; he lived his life as a work of art, and at times, his personal life has overshadowed the significance of his contribution to modernism and to modern Japanese art. His appearance was carefully constructed and transformed into an artistic identity, a theme reiterated in many of his drawings and self-portraits. He delighted in experimenting with textiles, combining textures and patterns; he sewed his own clothes and tailored his shirts and jackets, drawing inspiration from traditional Japanese basting stitches. In Paris, he fascinated both the public and critics eager for novelty and drawn to the exotic. In Japan, however, his countrymen viewed his style critically, as though accusing him of disrespecting Japanese tradition and feverishly adopting Western models.

Foujita received his education at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. His approach life—embracing both cultures—extended into his art, where he fused Eastern and Western traditions. In his first year, he studied nihonga, the traditional Japanese painting style, under Seihō Takeuchi and Gyokushō Kawabata. The following year, he shifted to yōga, the Japanese term for Western-style oil painting. This transition took place at a time when Japan was actively negotiating its cultural modernity, and it highlights the technical versatility he developed across multiple media.

Foujita lived during a period of profound transformation for both Japan and the wider world. In Japan, modernisation unfolded rapidly rather than gradually, in contrast to the European experience shaped over centuries by the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions. Prior to unification under the Tokugawa shogunate, the country had endured internal conflicts throughout the sixteenth century. During the early modern period, Japan limited contact with Europe, effectively closing its borders for approximately 250 years.

Japan’s isolation ended in July 1853, when American warships entered Tokyo Bay and demanded the opening of trade. Commercial relations began in 1854 with the United States and, from 1858 onwards, expanded to other nations, including France, the United Kingdom, Russia, and the Netherlands. The Opium War had already demonstrated the extent of Western military power, instilling in Japan a deep fear of colonisation. In response, reform-minded samurai overthrew the Tokugawa regime and established the Meiji government in 1868.

Modernisation, however, also provoked nationalist resistance. In the 1880s, critics contended that Western oil painting posed a threat to Japanese artistic traditions, which typically employed materials such as paper, silk, plant-based pigments and water. The art historian Takashina Shūji wrote:

“The importation of “Western-style” painting to Japan was not a matter of appropriating the realistic form of expression based on laws of perspective and chiaroscuro. It encompasses the entire concept of oil painting—materials and techniques which had hitherto been virtually unknown in Japan… It was practically equivalent to importing an entire civilisation.”

The Department of Western Painting, previously closed, was reinstated under Kuroda Seiki, who had studied in France with Raphaël Collin. Kuroda introduced an academic Impressionist style to Japan and became Foujita’s teacher when he entered the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1905. Foujita, however, was not strongly drawn to Kuroda’s Impressionism, instead preferring the Symbolist tendencies of Fujishima Takeji. Even as a student, he resisted academic convention, continuing to use black ink despite Kuroda’s prohibition. His ambition to become a modern Western artist was never deterred.

On 18 June, after lengthy discussions with his father, the twenty-six-year-old Foujita set out for Paris, intending to study there for three years. He hoped to enrol at the École des Beaux-Arts but was deemed too old for admission. Instead, he secured a position as a registered copyist at the Louvre. There, he studied historical and religious painting from the Western canon and examined Greek, Etruscan and prehistoric art. Alone in Paris, he settled at 14 Cité Falguière, a cluster of artists’ studios in Montparnasse.

Upon arrival, Foujita encountered an established art scene dominated by the School of Paris—a community of foreign artists who gathered in Montparnasse to exchange ideas and cultivate their creative expression—and the vogue for Cubism. Yet he showed little interest in Cubism, abstraction, or the exuberant colour explorations of the Fauves. To understand his reluctance, one must consider context: for Japanese artists, modernity was associated with figurative art and the academic nude, genres largely absent from traditional Japanese art, with only a few exceptions such as works by Kuroda Seiki. Foujita sought to carve out his own path within the Parisian art world while deliberately sidestepping the dominant styles of the time.

Paris, in the exuberant post-war era of the ‘Roaring Twenties,’ encouraged cosmopolitan encounters but could be unforgiving in matters of national belonging. Within the Japanese diaspora, Foujita met Riichiro Kawashima and Shinzō Fukuhara, the renowned photographer who would later spearhead Shiseido cosmetics. He also met the Chilean painter Manuel Ortiz de Zárate, who, like many artists, admired Foujita’s sartorial elegance. Zárate became an important connection and close friend, introducing him to various artists. Foujita later met Diego Rivera and Picasso, who at that time had painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). In his studio on rue Schoelcher, Foujita discovered the works of Henri Rousseau, le Douanier, whose aesthetic profoundly influenced his subsequent oeuvre. Throughout this period of adjustment, he worked tirelessly, dedicating himself to his drawing and painting.

In Montparnasse, he became acquainted with a vibrant intellectual community that included Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine, Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Kiki de Montparnasse, Michális Ikonómou, Ruytchi Souzouki, Jean Cocteau and Henri Matisse. He also met Raymond Duncan, Isadora Duncan’s brother, and took dance classes at his Akademie. Perhaps the most decisive encounter would be Fernande Barrey, a free-spirited model and artist who played a crucial role in Foujita’s career and became his first wife in France.

Barrey introduced Foujita to the art dealer Georges Chéron, who represented Modigliani and Soutine. Chéron organised the first solo exhibition of Foujita’s work at his gallery near the Champs-Élysées. The exhibition was an outstanding success: all 110 watercolours were sold. Picasso, among the first visitors, spent hours at the show and purchased several works. Foujita’s secret lay above all in his exceptional craftsmanship, distinguished by delicate, fluid lines and remarkable expressive sensitivity as a portraitist. He sought to forge his own style by synthesising the formal principles of Japanese ukiyo-e and calligraphy with European modernist innovation. Examining both traditions closely, he integrated them, identifying formal correspondences and reinterpreting techniques. The result was a distinctive visual vocabulary characterised by flat backgrounds, fine linear contours, and highly stylised forms—an equilibrium between quotation and innovation that reconciled Eastern and Western traditions.

Another remarkable technique he developed was the use of a fine brush and a restrained black-and-white palette on a luminous white ground. This milky surface, prepared with an emulsion of linseed oil, powdered chalk, lead white, and magnesium silicate, produced an opalescent glow that appeared both modern and archaic. At a time when Cubists and Fauves emphasised bold colour and abstraction, Foujita’s delicacy and restraint stood apart. His luminous white surface became his signature, instantly recognisable in the competitive art world and demonstrating that innovation could emerge not only from radical abstraction but from a reimagining of materials and tradition.

Reflecting on this, Foujita said:

“I suddenly realised that there are very few paintings of nudes in Japan. In the paintings of Harunobu or Utamaro, there are merely glimpses of part of an arm or a small area around the knee. I realised that they conveyed the sensation of skin only in those places. For the first time, I decided to try to represent that most beautiful material: human skin.”

One of his most striking canvases, Reclining Nude with Toile de Jouy (1922), exhibited at the Salon d’Automne, presents a nearly monochromatic nude outlined in sinuous black ink.

The model, Kiki de Montparnasse, is depicted with visible underarm and pubic hair—a realistic detail sharply contrasting with the idealised body. Drawing from Manet and Titian while re-examining Japanese erotic traditions, Foujita incorporated a playful reference to toile de Jouy.

Later, Lucie Badoud—renamed Youki (‘snow’ in Japanese)—became both muse and companion, until she fell in love with the Surrealist poet Robert Desnos, who would later die in a concentration camp in 1945. Reclining Woman (Youki) (1923) exemplifies his luminous fond blanc technique.

By the late 1920s, Foujita’s works were internationally exhibited and collected, his prosperity fuelling a taste for extravagance. He was, notably, an artist who entered the French state collection even before Picasso.

Yet history eventually caught up with him, a tax dispute forcing his return to Japan in 1928. As Europe descended into war and Germany invaded France in 1940, Foujita found himself in a Japan that was increasingly shaped by imperialism and militarism. Viewed with suspicion, he assumed the role of official war painter. During Japan’s invasion of China in 1937 and throughout the Second World War, his artistic skill was mobilised for propaganda. After the war, the moral ambiguity of this period complicated his legacy.

In the early 1950s, Foujita returned to France with his fifth wife, Kimiyo. He renounced Japanese citizenship, became a French citizen and converted to Catholicism, adopting the name Léonard in homage to Leonardo da Vinci. He later designed and decorated the Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-la-Paix in Reims, now known as the Chapelle Foujita, where he and Kimiyo are buried.

Although he remained outside the dominant avant-garde movements, his influence endured. He encouraged younger artists such as Jirō Yoshihara, later founder of the Gutai group, to pursue independent and experimental paths. His synthesis of Eastern and Western traditions anticipated the transnational character that would come to define late twentieth-century contemporary art.

Foujita never fully belonged to a single world. This in-betweenness was both his strength and his vulnerability. He forged aesthetic alliances between East and West, navigated Parisian modernity and constructed a singular artistic identity, yet he also entered political misalliances that continue to complicate his legacy. Between the luminous whiteness of his canvases and the violence of the century that engulfed him lies a persistent fracture—that of the cosmopolitan artist negotiating freedom and constraint. It is within this unresolved tension that Foujita remains strikingly contemporary.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

For more on Foujita, see: Sylvie Buisson, Catherine Delot, Michael Lucken, Anne Le Diberder, Toshio Shimizu, Aya Louisa McDonald or Yoko Hayashi.

In 1971, Lee Ufan was in France for his first exhibition at the Paris Biennale. As the story goes, he met with the curators and explained the conception of his work: a stone placed on a metal plate. Decisions were made, the metal plate was ordered, and everything seemed to proceed smoothly—until the subject of the stone arose. What kind of stone? Transporting one from Japan or Korea was out of the question.

Fine, Lee said, there would be a stone in Paris. There had to be. He searched everywhere, but none of the stones he encountered was right. They lacked something—weight, density, shape. On the night before the opening, wandering the outskirts of Paris with a friend, still searching and still convinced that the stone he sought existed, he suddenly came upon it. This was it. Exactly the stone he had been looking for. They carried it back to the exhibition space, left it there, and went to sleep, certain they would install it in the morning. When they returned the next day, the stone was gone. In its place were the police. He was informed that the stone was Japanese and had been stolen from the Jardin d’Acclimatation.

At that point, it became clear what had been guiding his search all along. In looking for an “absolute” stone, he was unconsciously searching for a Japanese or Korean one: a stone shaped by volcanic forces and violent tectonic movements over millions of years. Such a stone could not simply be found in Europe, whose geology was fundamentally different. The anecdote is useful in understanding how our environment shapes our perception. The mistake was not practical, but conceptual.

Later, Lee Ufan would write in The Art of Encounter:

“If you notice that the stone is a piece of nature, however, its non-material qualities pull you into a mysterious, unknown world. When you feel life and see the universe in stone, it is stone but not stone. It is something more than stone. This does not mean that the stone has been extended as an object. The fact that the stone looks like something more than stone is because it spreads out and blends into a larger world. The stone has a mysterious reality because it is an entity that is solidly connected to the world, and it expresses natural qualities transcending stone. The stone is there as nature rather than nature as a stone. The stone is too natural because it contains a world that is so far beyond human beings.”

Indeed, the stone in this sense becomes a relational point. The mineral material relates to the artist who chooses it, to the metal plate alongside which it is displayed, and to the viewers who engage with it. Stones, like steel and human beings, come into existence and eventually dissipate through various processes—indeterminate and shaped by natural forces.

Lee Ufan was born in Seoul in 1936 and grew up in Korea under Japanese occupation. Raised at the convergence of two cultural traditions, he pursued his studies in both countries: painting, calligraphy, and poetry at the College of Kyongnam and Seoul Fine Arts University, and later in Tokyo, where he studied philosophy at Nihon University. In the postwar years, Japan pursued policies oriented toward economic growth and stability, accompanied by accelerated urban development and social reconstruction. During the transformative decades of the 1960s and 1970s, Japan produced some of the most innovative image-making technologies. Public spaces became increasingly saturated with billboards and mediated imagery, as technology reshaped modes of perception and social interaction.

Through deep philosophical inquiry, Lee began to consider the possibility of withdrawing art from the world of images and text. His lived experience of colonialism profoundly shaped his approach to art. He questioned how one might create an oeuvre without an overbearing author imposing individual subjectivity. How could an artist remain the maker of a work while deliberately retracting from it? Creation without domination? Not long after, he arrived at a solution. He would depart from Western notions of representation and shift attention away from the artist’s hand. In doing so, he broke with the modernist idea of the artist imposing a singular vision upon the world.

But was partial self-erasure truly possible? Lee believed it was. He chose not to depict recognisable subjects, instead creating site-specific installations and conceptual sculptures, and later, vibrant abstractions that exude emotion and sensation. His aim was to reconfigure the interaction between object, space, and viewer. The unmade had to be introduced in place of what was made—a decisive break from conventional modes of thinking focused exclusively on fabrication. Consequently, much of his subsequent practice has been devoted to renewing perception and awakening the senses from the dullness of everyday experience.

In the late 1960s, along with artists such as Kishio Suga, Koji Enokura, Susumu Koshimizu, and Jiro Takamatsu, Lee co-founded the Mono-ha movement (“School of Things”), an influential avant-garde practice that emphasised the relationship between materials and the artist’s gesture—or its absence. Lee served as both the group’s most prominent member and its principal theorist. The questions raised by Mono-ha artists centred on whether meaning could emerge not from representation, but from spatial relationships among objects. Lee encouraged the privileging of raw materials such as stone, steel, wood, and glass, engaging them through minimal intervention while foregrounding relational dynamics among perception, spatial arrangement, and embodied experience. The goal was not monumentality or permanence, but contingent, temporary experience. Ultimately, Lee sought to create works that could be felt, rather than merely observed.

The technological conditions anticipated in Japan during the 1970s have since become pervasive, constituting the world in which we now live. Goods, images, and data are generated at ever-increasing speeds, producing a continuous stream that competes for our attention and desire for instant gratification. This environment reorganises perception around immediacy, circulation, and consumption. What was once a cultural preference for plenitude—horror vacui, the fear of empty space—has evolved in modern and contemporary discourse into an impulse toward total saturation and an aversion to emptiness. Reflecting on similar transformations, Lee Ufan observes:

“Today’s civilisation… is an urban civilisation: New York, Tokyo, Paris, London… these are very advanced, industrialised cities, so there is no room for the space of yeo baek [emptiness]. The cities are filled up, and there’s no space left, so people live there, but I think this is not natural for living things.”

In Korean philosophy, the concept of yeo baek (emptiness, lingering white space) exists in relation to yeosil (that which is tangible, vivid, and real). Emptiness here is not void, but a space for contemplation. As Lee explains: “Yeo baek (emptiness) is the portion of our world that has not been created—the untouched portion.” The concept holds a particular allure, stemming from a desire to think about space at a measured pace: more emptiness, freer feeling. “That is my motif,” Lee asserts, “so my works – whether they are paintings or sculptures – contain many empty spaces, and the connection to the outside world plays an important role.”

But how does Lee create these meditative spaces? Through gestures of great simplicity that ground his practice in materiality and physical action. The Relatum series, initiated in 1968 and produced until 2019, consistently employs a minimal selection of materials—stone paired with glass or steel plates—arranged in specific spatial configurations. Each work features a particular stone, typically sourced from the exhibition’s location, and a distinct floor-based sheet of glass or steel. In their natural, mineral states, stones belong to an unknown world of ‘externality’ that predates human existence. Selected through chance encounters, they may bear edges softened by erosion or remain rough and angular.

Over time, Lee incorporated stones from across the globe: slightly reddish stones from Australia reminiscent of Uluru, volcanic rocks from Japan and Korea, granite and basalt from Europe, as well as raw, unpolished river and field stones.

The glass sheets may be matte or cracked, while the steel plates can be untreated, matte, or minimally finished. Each stone placed upon the surface possesses a self-contained volume and a free form—not sculpted or idealised, but shaped by geological time. Rolled steel and glass, though industrially manufactured, originate from geological materials such as stone and sand; they are, in this sense, distant and abstract derivatives of stone. The inorganic elements found in rocks and sand, such as calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, and sodium, are also present in the human body.

When combined, these materials form a relational field rather than a compositional hierarchy. For example, if the glass sheet beneath the rock is cracked, it influences the viewer’s perception of both the work and the surrounding space. The crack registers an event: the moment when pressure and impact marked the encounter between force and material limit. Conversely, if the underlying sheet is made of rolled, polished steel, the material’s resistance becomes apparent, as it does not bend or change upon contact with the stone.

The way Lee Ufan selects and arranges these plates and stones directly shapes the viewer’s spatial perception. This effect arises from the tension between the rock’s heaviness and the glass’s fragility, the contrast between opacity and transparency, and the juxtaposition of natural elements with industrial, standardised products. The artwork becomes co-created—resonating with its environment and with viewers who move around it, or glimpse their own reflections in the materials. Lee’s approach thus transforms the artwork from a static object into an active, situational experience in which space itself appears to expand.

For Lee, stones are both familiar and strange, embodying what is known and what remains elusive. The unmade opens the possibility of another dimension of expression, transforming both what is present and what is withheld. As he observes,

“When people meet stones, they bow their heads with a certain degree of effort. Humanity has had a ritual of worship for stones from time immemorial. So there is a certain sense of reverence for stones, whether one makes a tomb with stones, or a house with stones, or a sculpture.”

By emphasising the ‘nobility’ or ‘aura’ of stones, Lee suggests that they are not merely materials to be used or discarded. Seen this way, stones are no longer obstacles to be removed, but presences imbued with memory, life, and deep time.

Perhaps Lee Ufan is right when he says, “The highest level of expression is not to create something from nothing, but rather to nudge something that already exists so that the world shows up more vividly.”

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

For more on Lee Ufan, see:

Lee Ufan, The Art of Encounter, translated by Stanley N. Anderson, Lisson Gallery & Serpentine Gallery.

Lee Ufan, Habiter le Temps/ Inhabiting Time, Centre Pompidou-Metz.

The first time I discovered Alina Szapocznikow’s work, I was struck by her self-portraits. One of them, made in 1966, represents a small sculptural figure composed of two different materials: a smooth, opaque white marble for the body and a translucent, flat, disk-like head made from polyester resin. What first caught my attention was her use of materials and her manipulation of proportion; her deliberate distortions and stylisations recast the entire form. The circular disc, though not a naturalistic human shape, has embedded within its material a pair of lips in flesh tones with a slightly glossy finish. It is the only marker of the face. There is no mimetic recognition.

The overall shape of the bust is softened, almost biomorphic, with two rounded, breast-like forms rising from the front surface. She also played with the surface: some areas are very smooth and polished (easier to catch the light), while others are a bit rougher, with a delicate, grainy texture. For me, this gradual dissolution of materials—from the luminous translucency of resin to the dense, weight-bearing solidity of marble—and the corresponding mutation of forms signal Szapocznikow’s desire to register the body’s fundamental ephemerality. The question, then, is how she achieves this articulation of impermanence within the language of sculpture.

Alina Szapocznikow was born in 1926 in Kalisz, Poland, into an intellectual Jewish family. Her youth was tragically interrupted when, at sixteen, she was deported to the ghettos of Pabianice and then Łódź, then to Auschwitz, and later to Bergen-Belsen. She survived the concentration camps largely because her mother, a physician, kept her close as an assistant. After the war, she went to Prague to study sculpture with Joseph Wagner, followed in 1948 by two years at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

For centuries, draftsmanship has served as a foundational discipline for sculptural practice, and Szapocznikow’s early studies situate her within a long lineage—from Michelangelo, Bernini, and Canova to Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth—who mastered drawing alongside the demanding medium of stone. In the postwar period, drawing remained an integral part of her practice. She drew the sandstone grottoes by the Baroque sculptor Matthias Bernard Braun near Kuks in former Czechoslovakia, as well as the gravestones she encountered at Père Lachaise in Paris.

Throughout her career, Szapocznikow questioned the representation of the body and how permanence is framed in sculpture.

“My gesture is addressed to the human body, ‘that complete erogenous zone,’ to its most vague and ephemeral sensations. I want to exalt the ephemeral in the folds of our body, in the traces of our passage.” – Alina Szapocznikow, March 1972

In her formative years in Prague and Paris, she studied proportions and scrutinised the female anatomy through book reproductions. It was a way of testing out possible ideas for realisation, always with an acute awareness of bodily vulnerability. As her practice evolved, each detail in her sculptures conveyed her shifting approaches to the body and anatomy through degrees of abstraction or fragmentation. Her work subsequently incorporated singular forms—from human bellies to nipples to crushed features. The outcomes are consistently arresting conflations of the refined and the grotesque, juxtaposing pleasure and abjection. Corporeal vulnerability may illuminate certain dimensions of her practice, but it cannot serve as a comprehensive explanatory framework, for the body is also a site of pleasure. These two conditions, which animate and destabilise the corporeal form, are precisely what Szapocznikow sought to apprehend in her art.

Midway through her first stay in Paris, she fell ill with tuberculosis and, for various reasons, returned to Poland. In 1951, the country was marked by political transformations under a communist regime with strong Soviet influences. Back in Warsaw, Szapocznikow lived with her first husband, Ryszard Stanisławski, and adopted a son, Piotr. Her work quickly gained momentum: she received public commissions and took part in significant exhibitions, including her 1957 solo show at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw and her participation in the 1962 Venice Biennale, where she represented Poland alongside two other artists. In these early years, she operated within the constraints imposed by the newly institutionalised doctrine of Socialist Realism, producing public monuments that conformed to its ideological demands. Yet it did not take long for her to push against this sanctioned rhetoric. Gradually, she began redirecting her realist approach toward the immediacy of her own life. A telling example is her Portrait of Barbara Kusak (1955): a plaster depiction of a friend as a modern woman, dressed in a fashionable turtleneck and rendered with boldly applied primary colours. Here, Szapocznikow loosened the grip of Socialist Realism, opening space for a more intimate approach to the body while eschewing the political symbolism characteristic of the era.

This turn toward a more personal sculptural language also shaped Szapocznikow’s approach to questions of collective memory. By the late 1950s, she began entering competitions for Holocaust memorials, an area in which the grammar of Socialist Realism typically demanded unambiguous heroism. Szapocznikow instead reflected on the practice of remembering and forgetting, and on how these shape the possibilities of art to testify to what no longer exists. Her memorial Hand. Monument to the Heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto II (Dłoń. Projekt Pomnika Bohaterów Warszawy II, 1957) commemorates the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, who in 1943 mounted a desperate, weeks-long resistance against Nazi rule. Rather than depicting heroic figures in the conventional idiom of the time, she distilled the event into a single monumental hand thrust upward, its fingers contorted and cramped. The gesture cuts through space like a rupture, conveying both resistance and the impossibility of adequate representation.

The hand, used as a metonym for human presence, recalls Alberto Giacometti’s La Main (1947) as well as Germaine Richier’s L’Homme Forêt (The Forest Man, 1945). During her student years in Paris, Szapocznikow visited museums and galleries such as the Rodin Museum and Galerie Maeght, which exhibited Richier’s bronzes and plasters. Art historian Sarah Wilson reminds us that between 1947 and 1950 the sculptor Nathan Rapoport was creating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Monument, with figures reminiscent of Rodin’s Gates of Hell. Szapocznikow’s hand signals the struggle, the desperation, the frozen cry of a people facing collective death; the isolated single hand becomes a symbol of their determination not to disappear.

Following Wilson’s argument that Szapocznikow inherits elements from Rodin—fragmented limbs, charged cast surfaces, expressive anatomy—as well as from Richier, we can see how certain postwar figures echo her vision of the body as a site of profound instability. In this light, Szapocznikow’s engagement with representation shows not only the body’s vulnerability or perishability but also its vitality and power. As she wrote:

“I am convinced that of all the manifestations of the ephemeral the human body is the most vulnerable, the only source of joy, all suffering, and all truth.”-Alina Szapocznikow

Szapocznikow further complicates these sculptural traditions through her use of materials, which allowed her to generate surfaces that are soft, luminous, and sometimes unpredictable. New plastics could swell, drip, or resist control. From the 1960s onwards, she experimented with methods and materials that would significantly redefine the visual language of sculpture. She was a pioneer in her early use of polyester, polyurethane, and other industrial plastics, materials that embodied both the promises and the dangers of modernity.

To understand the depth of her artistic vocabulary, one must situate Szapocznikow within the cultural and artistic milieu of Paris in the 1960s and 1970s, where she lived from 1963 with her second husband, the graphic designer Roman Cieślewicz. Many art historians—including Griselda Pollock, Anda Rottenberg, Agata Jakubowska, Sarah Wilson, and Paweł Leszkowicz—have addressed the paradoxical position Szapocznikow occupied in twentieth-century art history. Though she had a prolific, albeit short, career (she died of breast cancer at forty-seven), her international visibility crystallised only decades after her death in 1973. Wilson considers her absence from major Parisian exhibitions, particularly those featuring avant-garde figures like Niki de Saint Phalle or Sheila Hicks, to stem more from the geopolitical and gender dynamics of the time than from the quality of her work. As an Eastern European Jewish woman, a survivor of the Shoah, and someone marked by displacement, Szapocznikow worked her entire life to assert her artistic autonomy in both Warsaw and Paris, navigating chronic frailty and volatile political circumstances.

In an increasingly dematerialised world, her convictions were shaped by historical trauma, illness, and experimentation with new materials, prompting her to engage with the emergent realities of the postwar era. Pollock’s feminist readings compel us to consider how bodies—human and non-human, organic and synthetic—interact, transform, and endure. In a series of drawings made between 1959 and 1963, Szapocznikow explored the connection between organic and anthropomorphic forms of body and nature. It is a fascinating series in which one first notices flowers, then gradually discovers forms that evoke the body’s interior: openings, cavities, claw-like protrusions. Across more than 600 drawings and monotypes, she articulated her thinking process and her endless variations on a formal idea.

“My work has its roots in sculpture.
For years I threw myself into studying problems of balance,
volume, space, shadow and light.”—Alina Szapocznikow

During this period, she cast parts of her own body—lips, belly, breasts, thighs, legs—which she reproduced in multiple forms. Leg (1962), cast from her own leg, was made in plaster, while works such as Lampe-bouche (1966) and Sculpture-Lampe (1970) were produced from coloured polyester resin, electrical wire, and metal, incorporating casts of her own body or those of friends such as Ariane Raoul-Duval, Roland Topor, or the British actor Julie Christie.

While Szapocznikow pushed representation into a kind of double alienation—transforming the body into both a sexualised object and a functional one—she kept the body as the primary vehicle of critique. The body persists in the impression it leaves behind.

Her work gestures toward the sculptural experiments of Pop and Nouveau Réalisme in the 1960s. Artists like Claes Oldenburg and César employed humour and object transformation to interrogate mass culture. Wilson notes that Szapocznikow drew from Oldenburg’s oversized food sculptures for her Desserts and belly-casts, yet she subverted these strategies by “turning Pop inside out,” appropriating its materials and forms while revealing their bodily, emotional, and existential implications. Her breasts-as-lamps, lips-as-objects, and torso casts oscillate between vulnerability and commodity, between objecthood and subjectivity, inhabiting a liminal space where pleasure and anxiety, desire and fear, overlap.

A similar tension intensifies in her Tumors series, made after her cancer diagnosis. These resin sculptures contain small photographs of the artist embedded within the polyester mass. The result is disturbing, playing with the tension between presence and absence, like beings frozen in amber. Even when language fails, or in the face of death, the body continues to speak; memory remains inscribed in it. Szapocznikow insisted on capturing this fleeting truth within the artwork's structure. The sculptures function as tactile vessels of lived experience and emotional resilience.

Her preoccupation with sculpture’s various functions and forms was not singular to her. In the mid-sixties, Louise Bourgeois, a self-trained sculptor, was searching for simpler forms, both geometric and organic. Similarly, Eva Hesse was exploring resin in her eroding sculptures, while Lynda Benglis developed her own poured interventions. Though Szapocznikow had no knowledge of their practices at the time, in retrospect we can find affinities in their formal languages, just as we can see echoes of her work in some of Bourgeois’s polymorphous forms. Szapocznikow and Bourgeois met in 1969 in Pietrasanta, Italy, while both were experimenting with Carrara marble. Szapocznikow had been working in marble since 1963, beginning with Biological Sculpture I; in 1969, she worked on her large Bellies. As Guitemie Maldonado argues, their encounter offers a framework for better understanding how form is elaborated: through layering, accretion, and agglutination, whether cast or constructed. For Szapocznikow, this inventiveness constitutes the material expression of a space where vitality and eroticism meet, where the body continues to assert itself against all odds.

Alina Szapocznikow’s oeuvre carries an uncanny urgency, prefiguring contemporary concerns with posthuman subjectivity, ecological interdependence, and the permeability of the body. Her sculptures expose the body as matter that refuses to be erased, even in a world that pretends this no longer matters.

For more on Alina Szapocznikow, see:

The exhibition Alina Szapocznikow. Langage du corps, at the Musée de Grenoble, until January 4, 2026. The show, in partnership with the Kunstmuseum Ravensburg, presents a selection of nearly 150 works created between 1947 and 1973.

Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955–1972, edited by Elena Filipović and Joanna Mytkowska, exhibition catalogue for the retrospective at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

In addition, further reading might include essays by Cornelia Butler, Jola Gola, Allegra Pesenti, Ursula Ströbele, Jo Applin, Sarah Wilson, Sophie Bernard, Griselda Pollock, Ute Stuffer, and Guitemie Maldonado.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

In a conversation with Alexander Kluge in 2012, Gerhard Richter defined himself as a “picture maker” rather than a painter. His words succinctly capture his thought-provoking complexity, illustrating a lifelong attempt to eradicate the traces of the human hand from his art while simultaneously positioning himself within the world of painting. Not incidentally, throughout his outstanding artistic career, he refused to commit to a single genre. Instead, he turned painting against itself, probing the limits of pictorial representation and questioning its nature and ability to retrieve collective memory. As with any great artist, his work reveals the mark-making through which every piece inevitably articulates a position towards the world. To make an image is to generate effects within the external realm—effects shaped by the artist’s deliberate choices in composition, formal structure, subject matter, the embrace of chance, or the interplay of all these elements. When Benjamin H.D. Buchloh asked Richter in 1986, “what is this act of making?”, the artist replied: “a picture, and therefore a model. [...] pictures concerned with the very possibility of social coexistence.” Viewed in this light, his work alludes to an endeavour to reconcile, in each piece, the most disparate and mutually contradictory elements, sustaining them together as living and viable with, as he stated, “the greatest possible freedom.”

Art, for Richter, “must be truthful” by preserving its inherent moral dimension. But what is this moral dimension and what is its purpose? When asked this by Nicholas Serota, Richter answered: “For surviving this world.... [Art] has the measure of all the unfathomable, senseless things, the incessant ruthlessness of our world. And art shows us how to see things that are constructive and good, and to be an active part of that.” Indeed, art can carry an antithetical valence; it can represent subjects from the world’s darkest moments while offering aesthetic pleasure in the subtle beauty of extraordinary compositions and touch, or bearing a sense of unexpected hope. Richter himself feels “still very sure that painting is one of the most basic human capacities... that make sense, that stay with us, as something human.” All in all, at a time when painting’s status as an essential mode of representation was contested, Richter reclaimed its relevance as a mode of thinking. For decades, he moved back and forth between abstraction and figuration, testing myriads of styles along with the resilience of his public, and producing, despite the heterogeneity of his work, a coherent and distinctive oeuvre.

The Gerhard Richter retrospective at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, curated by Nicholas Serota and Dieter Schwarz, traces the evolution of Richter’s pictorial vision, mapping his engagement with various painterly techniques, as well as sculpture, drawing, and photography. The sustained continuum of his works provides a remarkable depth and variety. The trademark of Richter’s gesture lies in concealing his hand by neutralising the brushstroke, while simultaneously drawing attention to the materiality of paint. In his figurative paintings, for instance, Richter typically appropriates an existing image, usually a photograph, as the point of departure for a new work. By contrast, in his abstract paintings, the process generally begins with the application of one or two dominant colours to the canvas, which serves as the ground for a dynamic sequence of additions and subtractions. In both cases, Richter successively scrapes, overlays, rubs, blurs and distorts until the picture finds its equilibrium, holding the tensions between destruction and reconstruction in balance.

As a boy, Richter witnessed destruction and reconstruction under both the Nazi and the subsequent communist GDR regime. Born in Dresden on February 9, 1932, he not only lived in a divided country but was also part of a generation that saw their families destroyed by war. His father, a schoolteacher in Reichenau (today part of Poland), joined the Nazi Party in line with the era’s prevailing conformity and was later sent to serve on the Eastern Front. The upheavals of this period instilled in Richter a deep distrust of top-down authoritarianism, imposed collectivist ideologies, and fixed viewpoints. During that time, Richter drew endlessly.

At nineteen, he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden, where, due to the domination of Socialist Realism and the censure of Western avant-gardes, he specialised in mural painting. Pablo Picasso and Renato Guttuso, both affiliated with the Communist Party, were among the few Western artists permitted to exhibit in East Germany. In 1959, Richter travelled to Kassel for the second edition of Documenta, where he discovered the works of Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Jackson Pollock, Jean Fautrier, and Lucio Fontana—painters who, as Richter later stated, were among the reasons he chose to leave East Germany.

In 1961, shortly before the construction of the Berlin Wall, he fled to Düsseldorf with his then-wife, Ema Eufinger. As a refugee, he obtained a state stipend and enrolled at the Kunstakademie, where Joseph Beuys had just been appointed a teaching post. The post-war avant-garde in Düsseldorf and nearby Cologne provided Richter with a vibrant community of artists, events, and publications. He experimented with Dada, collage, and décollage. He engaged briefly with American Abstract Expressionism, which valorised immediacy, subjectivity, and the expressive trace of the artist’s hand, but also with European Tachisme, with its emphasis on stains, smears, and improvisatory gestures as vehicles of authenticity. On the one hand, he had the freedom to practice a stylistic shift; on the other, he was a significant part of a collective of artists with whom he debated incessantly.

A turning point for Richter was his discovery of Pop Art through American magazines. Artists like Jim Dine, Allan Kaprow, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann, and Andy Warhol turned toward the imagery of everyday life—advertising, magazines, and packaging—embracing the graphic environment of a consumerist society with a deep sense of irony.

In Germany, however, the reality was rather different. Shadowed by its recent history, German society was being transformed by the post-Marshall Plan economic boom while still being split by ideology. Richter and his fellow artists, such as Konrad Lueg, Manfred Kuttner, and Sigmar Polke, engaged with Pop Art but adopted a more critical stance toward its iconography. For their part, they rejected both the detached formalism and the cool irony of American Pop. The challenge was how to unpack a social critique relevant to the fractured condition of their milieu. The solution, they thought, was a “new figurative direction”—a play on Soviet Socialist Realism that led them to coin the term “Capitalist Realism.” The name referred both to their past in communist East Germany (Polke and Kuttner also spent their youth in the GDR) and to what they perceived as the encroaching “Americanization” of their country.

Pop Art’s influence was pervasive and made a decisive mark on Richter’s practice. The most consequential was his decision to create paintings based on preexisting images and to tackle various subjects not in a hierarchical fashion but in the most “neutral” or democratic way possible. No artist has more intuitively understood the relationship between painting and photography as a ready-made as Richter did. It all began one day in 1962, when Richter, in his studio, chose to depict nothing more than a table, a familiar, everyday object. In his own words:

“I was able to see [the photograph] differently, as a picture... without all those conventional criteria which I formerly attached to art. There was no style, no composition, no judgment. It liberated me from personal experience. There was nothing but a pure picture.” (Richter in conversation with Rolf Schön, 1972)

The painting was made from a black-and-white illustration in the Italian magazine Domus, followed by an erasure of the table’s form through a gestural act of scribbling grey paint over it. Having destroyed almost all of his previous work, Table (1962) is catalogued as number one in his catalogue raisonné. This piece constitutes a significant step in Richter’s pictorial vocabulary, as it brings self-reflexivity and representation together on the canvas, demonstrating that abstraction and figuration are not opposing but complementary forces.

Through this aesthetic gesture, Richter inscribed himself in a lineage of artists who mobilised destruction as a foundation for creation. In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg erased a drawing by Willem de Kooning. Five years later, Lucio Fontana slashed his canvases to open the pictorial space to a third dimension. In 1961, Niki de Saint Phalle shot her canvases to create her Tir paintings. The desire to renew the medium of painting, proclaimed dead by so many after the Second World War, was a major preoccupation for European artists during the sixties, including Richter. He frequently deployed a destructive gesture—stripped of its negative connotations—in his work, using erasure or the subtraction of paint layers as a generative strategy.

What set Richter apart at that time was his grounding of this practice in the camera’s mechanical claim to objectivity, while simultaneously extending its scope through the inherently subjective nature of human perception. Working within this tension, he projected photographs onto canvas, traced their outlines in pencil, and then completed them in paint. This process establishes a dynamic contrast between the impersonal automatism of the projected image and the artist’s subjective intervention.

For instance, Tante Marianne (Aunt Marianne, 1965) is based on a 1932 photograph of Richter’s twelve-year-old aunt, Marianne Schönfelder, holding the baby Gerhard in her arms. Richter claims that a portrait is never so faithful to the sitter as when you paint after a photograph. Years later, the journalist Jürgen Schreiber discovered that his aunt, who had a mental illness, had been euthanised by the Nazis. Richter was unaware of this when he painted the work and only learned it two decades later through Schreiber. Surprised, he remarked: “My paintings are wiser than I am.”

Richter’s use of photography, he claimed, freed him from “personal implication.” This assertion is debatable; one could argue that any photograph carries personal implications through its framing of the world and the choice of subject. However, I take Richter to mean that a photograph, when used as a source for painting, does not insist on establishing a direct connection between the artwork’s appearance and some hidden reality. The process seems straightforward: he subordinates painting to photography, accentuates photographic effects in his painting, and then appropriates and renegotiates them through a painterly technique of neutralisation. His ambition has always been to make paintings that look more “photographic” than photography itself. Understanding this, one can sense how complex and paradoxical the goal remains, as he intensifies the painterly quality of a work while stripping it of personal expression or affect. The effects obtained are striking, yet they sustain the neutral character that, in his opinion, prevails in photography.

From 1962 to 1965, Richter approached countless themes. He had already begun assembling the photographs that constitute Atlas, the ever-expanding archive of source images from which he still draws. This practice evokes Pierre Nora’s claim that modern memory is, first and foremost, archival. Richter engages with history through all imaginable forms of representation, illustrating the porous boundaries between past and present while raising questions about the very conditions of memory’s possibility. If the past has shifted from visible to invisible, and if the present is fragmented and unstable, then memory demands that we discover who we are, or equally, what form our art might take. While engaging with the past through photographs, Richter aimed to place everything on the same level, submitting each motif to the same detached treatment. This resulted in blurred compositions, often in black and white, where his neutral, impersonal touch was applied to a disparate range of subjects, from a roll of toilet paper (Klorolle, 1965), and a kitchen chair (Küchenstuhl, 1965), to American bombers in photo-paintings that evoke both Vietnam and the Allied raids of World War II. In doing so, Richter makes us more insecure about where we stand.

By 1972, Richter’s international stature was affirmed when he was chosen to represent Germany at the Venice Biennale. Yet success for Richter has never meant mere external recognition, but rather an overcoming of his inner struggles with painting; throughout his career, there have been what he considered unpersuasive attempts. In 1973, for instance, Richter produced the series Annunciation after Titian (Verkündigung nach Tizian), a work that alludes to the nature of representation by moving far beyond a mere citation of the Renaissance master. Relying on a simple postcard and using a similar process of distortion, he confronts us with the essential nature of painting by conjuring the illusion of realism alongside its dissolution. We see how each successive canvas in the series becomes more diffuse than the last, until the image recedes, vanishing into a spectral haze of pigment. The once-discernible figure now hovers between representation and abstraction. Richter later admitted that he could not improve the image, the result being “a record of my [his] defeat.”

A similar dialectic between presence and absence is enacted in a series of paintings made between 1982 and 1983, in which Richter extends the tradition of genre painting. We recognise vanitas—still lifes rendered in a classical manner—skulls, candles, and flowers, all motifs reminiscent of Renaissance and Baroque art. Yet, within the materiality of these paintings, Richter’s attitude remains profoundly rational. Drawn from photographs, the canvases are softly blurred, producing striking effects of light and shadow. These works are evocative of mortality and ephemerality—themes that would continue to haunt Richter in the years to come.

Elsewhere, one finds large abstract canvases in vibrant colours alongside works in monochromatic grey, framed glass panels, and conceptual colour charts based on industrial paint samples, as well as portraiture and self-portraiture. Among them is the iconic portrait of his daughter, Betty (1988), who turns away from our gaze. Like all of Richter’s portraits, this one departs from the classical ideal, as it is based on a photograph taken more than ten years earlier. The portrait ceases to be a likeness of a person and becomes instead a reflection on the medium itself. The contorted posture, the meticulous depiction of her pinned-up hair, and her densely textured cardigan evoke a fragile balance between painterly gesture and photo-based realism. The larger consequence is to demonstrate, once and for all, the radical transfiguration of the photograph into a painting and the painting’s ability to endure through the dual modes of representation and abstraction.

One of the most significant series in this exhibition is Richter’s October 18, 1977, the culmination of a decade-long attempt to depict one of the most traumatising events in recent German history. On exceptional loan from MoMA, the fifteen black-and-white canvases depict the imprisonment and deaths of three members of the Baader-Meinhof Group on the night of October 17–18, 1977.

The Baader-Meinhof Group emerged in the late 1960s from a radical student movement protesting the Vietnam War, Western imperialism, the perceived “re-nazification” of German society, and authoritarian tendencies within West German institutions. A faction of this group, however, decided that protest was not enough and turned towards an “armed struggle,” calling themselves the Red Army Faction (RAF). Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Ulrike Meinhof were part of this faction, which Richter described as being driven by an “overriding, ideological motivation.” Forsaking their initial peaceful commitments, which had garnered some public support, the group escalated its activities to violence, including bank robberies, bombings, and assassinations targeting government, business, and U.S. military interests in West Germany. The climax occurred in 1977, when the group kidnapped the industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer and, in concert with Palestinian allies who hijacked a Lufthansa jet, demanded the release of their imprisoned leaders. That same night in the high-security Stammheim Prison, RAF leaders Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe were found dead in their cells—shot or hanged. Another, Irmgard Möller, survived with stab wounds. Previously, Holger Meins had died in prison from a hunger strike in 1974, and Ulrike Meinhof was found hanged in her cell in 1976, officially ruled a suicide.

These unfathomable events from recent German history remain profoundly traumatic and mysterious. The cooperative film project Germany in Autumn (1977–78), by directors including Alexander Kluge and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, tackled the subject to show how the group, through the kidnapping of innocent people, turned to terrorism, renouncing any viable political aim or moral principle. In 2004, Marlene Dumas also took on this subject, depicting Ulrike Meinhof not to sensationalise the horror but to restore the humanity of the dead. The theme has likewise drawn the attention of writers such as Don DeLillo and Heinrich Böll.

Richter returned to the subject eleven years later, in 1989, a time gap that granted him enough critical distance from the immediacy of the shock to approach the events as history. The art historian Benjamin H.D. Buchloh would characterise this as a breakthrough, a decisive move beyond the mere “representation of historical subjects in modern painting.” Indeed, Richter addresses history by engaging with its reflection in memory, complete with the distortions and emotional residue captured in archival material.

While some motifs are repeated, the subjects in the paintings remain imprecise and ambiguous. For instance, there are three close-ups of Gudrun Ensslin, who was found hanged, drawn from newspaper photographs. The images were initially rendered with striking precision, only to be subsequently blurred by Richter. The result is a systematic negation of representation’s function. The closer we look, the more the image withholds; details are denied at the very threshold of perception. At the same time, the blur instils in us a kind of voyeuristic compulsion—we want to discern the rope, reconstruct the scene, solve the mystery. Yet, the image resists such certainties and reminds us of Richter’s insistence that “people can get a sense that there is purpose in looking at those deaths, because there is something about them that should be understood.” Like history itself, the images remain elusive, opaque, and irreducible to clarity.

In another canvas, we see only an empty space—undoubtedly a cell—with a few books. The members of the RAF were from educated backgrounds, which deepens the question of their descent into violence and also raises questions about the German society of the time. Moving on to another painting, Hängende (Hanged), we recognize the same technique of blurring the image to the point of abstraction. Richter offers no answers, no ease, but instead raises more questions and more unease. This demonstrates his preoccupation not only with the possibility of painting but with how historical subjects refuse transparency. Here, Richter offers a space for reflection on the delusional machinery of ideology itself—a system that effaces the individual and, in its rigidity, dogmatism, and worship of violence, becomes a mirror of the fascism it claimed to oppose. What Richter paints, finally, is not violence but its afterimage: the grief and the loss of extinguished possibilities, such as the life Ulrike Meinhof might have lived had she not turned to terrorism.

Operating across multiple registers at once, Richter’s art captures and reconfigures actual traces of the past while gesturing towards the possibilities of memory itself, where our representation of what has been takes on a fluid, shifting reality. By letting the viewer oscillate between certainty and ambiguity, Richter created a pictorial ethic that acknowledges events and their wounds, melancholy, and silences without theatricalising them, leaving questions open. In this way, remembrance, situated between private recollection and collective history, surfaces to show how visual phenomena can evoke the complexities of human experience.

GERHARD RICHTER,

Fondation Louis Vuitton,

Octobre 17, 2025 – March 2, 2026

Subscribe now

Share

For more on Richter:

Gerhard Richter—Text, Writings, Interviews, Letters, 1961-2007, edited by Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist (2009).

Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, edited by Dietmar Elger (2010).

Gerhard Richter, Panorama, edited by Nicholas Serota, Camille Morineau, Dorothée Brill (2011-2012).

Gerhard Richter, catalogue of the exhibition, edited by Nicholas Serota and Dieter Schwarz. (2025).

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

Charles Dickens’s opening from A Tale of Two Cities could just as easily double as a précis of Paris and New York in the 1940s and ’50s: an age of rupture and reinvention, when brilliance and brutality, despair and exuberance, seemed to coexist on the same block. When Nazi Germany invaded Paris in 1940, many artists and intellectuals fled south, some gathering in Arcachon, where houses and villas overflowed with refugees such as Marcel Duchamp and Mary Reynolds, Man Ray, Salvador Dalí and Gala, Samuel Beckett and his partner Suzanne. Meanwhile, France was collapsing; from London, Charles de Gaulle called for resistance even as Marshal Pétain signed an armistice with Hitler. During this time, Jean-Paul Sartre and Henri Cartier-Bresson were both captured by the Germans and sent as prisoners of war to camps in Germany. This was the fate of many war prisoners, many of whom were French soldiers. In Paris, the Germans had introduced food rationing, reducing daily provisions to what was needed for bare survival. At that time, America’s stance in the conflict was still neutral, but that changed after 1941.

Nevertheless, despite the many restrictions imposed, some Parisians returned to the city. During that period, Picasso resumed work in his studio on the Rue des Grands-Augustins, while the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti returned to his atelier at 46 Rue Hippolyte-Maindron in Montparnasse. At the same time, the young Simone de Beauvoir was lecturing at the Lycée Molière, reading and writing relentlessly, and among other things, spending nights at the Hôtel Chaplain with one of her pupils, Nathalie Sorokine. Towards the end of March 1942, Sartre arrived in Paris after escaping from the prison camp in Trier, Germany.

For Beauvoir, the relationship with Sorokine proved to be double-edged. On the one hand, due to her conduct, her teaching license would be suspended in 1943. On the other hand, through Sorokine, who had first encountered Giacometti in one of the cafés in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, she and Sartre would come to know the artist themselves, possibly at the Brasserie Lipp, according to Beauvoir’s recollection in her book La Force de L'âge (The Prime of Life, 1960).

It was in these circumstances that the friendship between Sartre, Beauvoir, and Giacometti first took shape. The exhibition Beauvoir, Sartre, Giacometti: Vertiginousness of the Absolute at the Giacometti Foundation in Paris, curated by Émilie Bouvard, offers precisely a glimpse into the exchanges between the artist and the two philosophers, at a moment when the very notions of freedom, survival and existence were under scrutiny.

Alberto Giacometti was born in 1901 in the Bergell Valley, remote Swiss valley near the Italian border. He grew up in a household of artists: his father, Giovanni Giacometti (1863-1933), was a post-impressionist painter; his cousin, Augusto Giacometti (1877-1947), was also an artist; and his younger brother, Diego, a sculptor and decorator, became his lifelong collaborator. From an early age, Giacometti displayed a single-minded devotion to artistic practice. After settling in Paris in 1922, he entered Antoine Bourdelle’s studio and came under the influence of Henri Laurens and Jacques Lipchitz. It was both a formal education and a first contact with the discipline of Cubism. Besides this, Giacometti himself drew, paying close attention to a myriad of sources, from classical antiquity to Egyptian, Cycladic, and African traditions. There is a wonderful letter from him to Sartre in which he talks about his pursuit of art:

Perhaps what the exhibition missed was a detour through Giacometti’s Surrealist period, which might have illuminated more fully his intellectual affinities with existentialist thought and offered a more nuanced account of his friendship with Sartre and Beauvoir. Surrealists saw imagination as a channel through which the unconscious revealed itself in myriad of forms, from dreams to free association. Giacometti’s early Parisian exchanges with Louis Aragon and André Breton led him to experiment with the “theatre of cruelty,” a sort of Surrealist theatricality, in which he produced what Salvador Dalí in 1930 called “symbolically functioning objects.” Within Breton’s circle, Giacometti was compelled to navigate the political tensions over communism. While many Surrealists aligned with the Communist Party in the late 1920s, disputes grew over whether art should serve political struggle or remain independent. Giacometti leaned toward the stance of writers like Aragon, Éluard, and René Crevel, who sought to reconcile their artistic ideals with the Party doctrine. Paradoxically, this conflict deepened his connection with Breton, who became for Giacometti an increasingly important figure, both personally and intellectually. In the months that followed, he created Fleur en danger (1934), Circuit (1931-1932)—his first “horizontal” works—and one of his most violent pieces, Femme égorgée (Woman with Her Throat Cut), (1930-1933), in which he used Surrealist techniques of shocking juxtaposition, displacement, and even sadistic eroticism. This phase marked Giacometti’s exploration of his fears and dreams through sculpture.

Eventually, mounting frictions within the Surrealist circles culminated in Giacometti’s expulsion from the group. The charges, more political than aesthetic, cast him as a renegade: he was criticised for making decorative objects for an affluent clientele and for straying from the Surrealist ideals. Moreover, the suicide of René Crevel, gravely ill at the time, left a profound mark on Giacometti, who may have seen it as a manifestation of the Surrealists’ tragic inability to reconcile their internal divisions. By 1935, Giacometti had turned away from Surrealist theatricality, dismissing it as an imposture, much as he had earlier rejected Cubism as a “completely absurd enterprise.” What followed was a search for a new aesthetic: one oriented toward the real, with “resemblance” as its ultimate criterion.

In 1935, through his gallerists Pierre Loeb and Pierre Colle, Giacometti met Pierre Matisse (1900-1989), the younger son of the artist Henri Matisse. Pierre Matisse was an art dealer in New York, representing artists such as Joan Miró, Balthus, and Yves Tanguy, all of whom were among Giacometti’s friends. From 1936, Pierre Matisse began acquiring works by Giacometti, one of the first sculptures selected being Walking Woman (1933-1934). A friendship gradually unfolded between Pierre Matisse and Giacometti, sustained and deepened through their written correspondence. As Europe sank into a state of suspended anxiety, with war looming on the horizon, artists responded to the mounting crisis—Picasso, for instance, was working on Guernica—while collectors and art dealers grew even more attuned to contemporary production, aiming to represent more European art across the ocean.

People continued to flee to safer places; others died. Giacometti returned to Switzerland, where he remained until the end of the war. In Geneva, he met Annette Arm (1923-1993), whom he married in 1949. He also got in touch with the Swiss publisher Albert Skira, who had recently returned to Geneva. Skira, known for his publication of the Surrealist journal Minotaure, was launching a new magazine, Labyrinthe, and invited Giacometti to contribute drawings and texts. This periodical marked a pivotal shift from the Surrealist aesthetics towards the dominant concerns of existentialism. Giacometti played an integral role in its production. There was a growing complicity between Skira and Giacometti, who once described how impressed he was by his exchanges with the artist:

Our conversations were always punctuated by 'Ah, yes! Ah, no!' But if we kept it up then you noticed how much further Giacometti thought than the person he was talking with. When he raised his eyes, his look was doubting, sceptical, piercing, and, in a way, ironic. He gave the impression of playing with you, and before you answered his questions, he knew what you were going to say. I have never met anyone who could speak on so many different subjects with such authority. (Albert Skira, Giacometti à Labyrinthe, Les Lettres françaises, Paris, 1966)

It seems, indeed, that Giacometti left profound impressions upon his fellow companions. Simone de Beauvoir, reflecting on the affinities and the immediacy of the connection that united her, Sartre, and the artist, emphasised how deeply moved she was by his intelligence:

“I was struck by Giacometti’s intelligence. He had a really first-class mind, the sort that adheres to hard facts and shakes the meaning out of them. He was never satisfied with hearsay or approximation; he went straight to the heart of a subject and teased it out with unbounded patience. (…) Curiosity was the special shape that this passionate love of life assumed”. (Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, Penguin, 1965, p.145)

Elsewhere, she evokes him as a larger-than-life figure:

“A man with craggy face, wild hair, avid eyes, who was out every night wandering the pavement, alone or with a very pretty woman; he looked both as solid as a rock and freer than an elf: it was too much.” (Simone de Beauvoir, La force de L’âge, vol.II, Paris 1960, p.321)

During the war years, Giacometti produced sculptures of minuscule size—so small that when he returned to Paris in 1945, after the Liberation, he brought them in six matchboxes. Both Annette and Simone de Beauvoir became the subjects of Giacometti’s sculptures and drawings in the following years. In 1946, Giacometti sculpted three heads of Simone de Beauvoir. His practice highlights his quest to capture the essence of the individual: he deconstructed the space and rethought the relationship between the figure and the void. His pursuit was to represent a face in its context by making real the vision he carried. In his own words:

“What interests me in all painting is resemblance-that is to say, what resemblance means for me; that which allows me to discover a little of the external world.”

Giacometti was preoccupied with resemblance, which had nothing to do with naturalistic concerns of faithful rendering. It was a way of uncovering the external world as it represents itself to us through our sensations. For fifteen years, Giacometti had not yet exhibited his work.

In 1948, Pierre Matisse organised Giacometti’s first solo exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, for which the artist invited Sartre to contribute a text. The famous essay The Search for the Absolute (1948) was the first to link Giacometti’s work to existentialism. Sartre had worked during the “drôle de guerre” (“phony war”) on his masterpiece of phenomenological ontology, published in 1943 under the title Being and Nothingness. At its core stands the relationship between consciousness and the world, the famous Sartrean idea that existence precedes essence: we are not born with a fixed nature but invent ourselves through the choices we make. Sartre is radical when he claims that each person is responsible for their own existence by stressing individual freedom of choice and the responsibility this entails. However, freedom is often unbearable, so we slip into bad faith, pretending our lives are determined by role or circumstances. Nevertheless, the gaze of others both defines us and robs us of our own authority: every relation is charged with tension. In France, during and after the war, existentialist ideas confronted the dilemmas of how to move forward after the horrors of war. Its emphasis on individual freedom of choice and action in the face of life’s absurdity required a great deal of honesty and courage. Sartre’s 1948 essay on Giacometti marks a defining moment in grasping the artist’s preoccupation with vision and the irreducible distance between subject and object.

Sartre writes:

“Giacometti does not recognize such a thing as Progress in the fine arts, he does not consider himself more ‘advanced’ than his contemporaries, or by preference, the man of Eyzies, the man of Altamira. In that drastic youthfulness of nature and of men, neither the beautiful nor the ugly yet existed, neither taste nor people possessing it; and there was no criticism: all this was still in the future. For the first time, the idea came to one man to sculpt another in a block of stone. There was the model: man.” (Jean-Paul Sartre, La Recherche de l’Absolu, in Situations II, Paris, Gallimard, 1949, p.289-99)

However, Giacometti’s relationship to existentialism was more complex than what a close friendship alone might suggest. Sartre (1943, 1948) describes Giacometti’s sculptures as “always half-way between nothingness and being,” while referring to the sculptor’s “horror of the infinite.” Though Giacometti largely acquiesced, he also made handwritten comments on Sartre’s 1948 text that Sartre partly disregarded. In contrast with the Surrealists, Sartre rejected the concept of the unconscious, arguing instead that consciousness is entirely self-transparent and expresses itself through intentional acts.

Sartre writes:

"Thus Giacometti has resolved in his own way the problem of the unity of the multiple: he has just suppressed multiplicity. It is the plaster or the bronze which can be divided: but this woman who moves within the indivisibility of an idea or of a sentiment, has no parts, she appears totally and at once. It is to give sensible expression to this pure presence, to this gift of the self, to this instantaneous coming forth, that Giacometti resorts to elongation. The original movement of creation, that movement without duration, without parts, and so well imaged by these long, gracile limbs, traverses their Greco-like bodies, and raises them towards heaven.

I recognize in them, more clearly than in an athlete of Praxiteles, the figure of man, the real beginning and absolute source of gesture. Giacometti has been able to give this matter the only truly human unity: the unity of the Act. Such, I think, is the sort of Copernican revolution Giacometti has tried to introduce into sculpture.

Before him the effort was to sculpt being, and that absolute melted away in an infinity of appearances. He has chosen to sculpt the situated appearance, and he has shown that in this way the absolute may be attained." (Sartre, The Search for the Absolute, op. cit. p.14)

Elsewhere, he adds:

"Each one of them reveals man as one sees him to be, as he is for other men, as he appears in an intersubjective world, not, [...] at a proper human distance; each shows us that man is not there first and to be seen afterwards, but that he is the being whose essence is to exist for others." (idem)

Indeed, in Giacometti’s post-war sculpture we can grasp the unity of the work of art. For the Falling Man (1950), he crafted a pillbox-shaped base to serve as both a physical and visual anchor for the delicate figure represented in the act of toppling. It follows that the imminent fall, rather than the figure, appears to be the sculpture’s central focus. The title, Giacometti wrote in a letter to Pierre Matisse in the 1950s, “un homme qui chavire,” literally translated as“a capsizing man”, was the only he could describe a man falling. Numerous scholars have interpreted this sculpture as an embodiment of the sensation of vertiginousness: the weariness and dizziness experienced at the brink of a precipice. Perhaps it is an iconic existential image evoked in the writings of both Sartre and Beauvoir.

The exhibition also features pencils portraits of Beauvoir (1946) and Sartre (1949), where one can observe Giacometti’s technique. He shifted constantly between layering and erasing lines, experimenting with frontal, profile, and three-quarter views, always in pursuit of the most exhaustive vision of the head before him. He often expressed his goal as:

“To see a head, to see it alive, to maintain it so.”

Existentialist thought, and Giacometti’s friendships with Sartre and Beauvoir undoubtedly left an imprint on his practice. He believed that the qualities of the visible interpenetrate and ultimately dissolve into space, since our everyday vision is shaped less by direct perception than by habit and reasoning. True to his artistic practice, Giacometti remained committed to perceptual truth, always questioning where the boundaries of a figure truly lie. His work emphasises the paradoxes and the inherent dissatisfactions that arise from the mystery of visibility. It confronts us as viewers, pressing against the very limits of our ability to be affected by art.

Exhibition Beauvoir, Sartre, Giacometti: Vertiginousness of the Absolute at the Giacometti Foundation, Paris, France

June 19-October 12, 2025

Subscribe now

Share

Bodies are stories. And every story, as it moves through time, finds a body to carry it. In Ancient Greece, a human life unfolded as a sequence of ritual thresholds—birth, initiation, marriage, the passage into old age, and finally death, imagined as the soul’s descent into the underworld. Each transition signified metamorphosis: the surrender of innocence, the acquisition of maturity, the flowering of youth, and the inevitable waning of the body with age. These are familiar stories. On a second glance, however, bodies are inescapably gendered and aged, and their stories are shaped not only by the social relationships in which they exist but also by how politics regulate them, for the body is always political.

When Marlene Dumas opens the conversation, at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens, between her paintings and figurines from the museum’s collection, she tells the story of the human body: “from being born, being young, being attractive and seductive, being betrayed and attacked, to being old and trying not to die.”

The exhibition’s title, Cycladic Blues, is also the name of a painting from 2020, depicting an elongated, shield-shaped head, with a rounded chin, a long and narrow nose, two small circular eyes and a single, slightly arched line suggesting a mouth, set perhaps in sorrow. The palette is black, grey and yellow, touched with dramatic whitish tones. For this show, together with curator Douglas Fogle, Dumas selected artefacts ranging from the Cycladic Bronze Age to sculptures from the Classical period. These figures, carved chiefly from marble, captivate through the clarity of their contours, minimalist design and the radical abstraction of the human form.

Inevitably, our modern gaze is refracted through the lens of twentieth-century art, compelling us to consider these works alongside those of Modigliani, Constantin Brancusi or Jean Arp. Most examples from the Cyclades represent nude female forms, their arms folded across the abdomen, their bodies etched with fine incised lines that mark either the pubic region or the conjoined legs, with knees slightly bent. The figurines—some of them distinguished by their shield or lyre-shaped heads and polished limbs, others fragmented—have been unearthed largely in tombs, suggesting perhaps that they once carried weight in the funerary rites.

In Cycladic Blues (2020) painting, Dumas’s use of luminous washes of diffuse ochre transparency, mingled with a dense, black-grey saturated background, carries a striking force. There is a certain power that lies in the plural form of the word “blues”, as it can signify wavelengths, emotions or even a musical style that turns feeling into form. The blues, therefore, becomes for Dumas a practice rather than a state: an act of reclaiming the possibility of emotion from a world that tends to exploit it or flatten it. For there are many blues and sorrows that shape a life.

In one of her paintings, Glass Tears (for Man Ray) (2008), Dumas draws from Man Ray’s 1930s photograph Tears. His surrealist image of a French model resembles a film still: her mascara-coated lashes gaze upwards, while small glass beads appear as tears on her cheeks. It is an arresting image, prompting the viewer to wonder where she is looking and what is the source of her sorrow. It constitutes an aestheticisation of female suffering—a transposition of emotional distress. Dumas saw the photograph in a publication that described the image as a prototype for the cultural representation of crying. Though the reference to Man Ray remains explicit, Dumas uses it as a point of departure by transforming it into a painting. By its very nature, the painterly gesture constitutes a moral act: it begins from nothing, generating a surface animated by the artist’s physical movements and deliberate choices. The scattered droplets of water across the canvas underscore the tension between control and accident inscribed in the work’s texture.

A similar intention is visible in Persona (2020), in which she renders through distortion and abstraction a human face-form that cannot be clearly individuated. There is sorrow in this indeterminacy. Persona, Dumas explains, is rooted in the Latin word for “mask”—a practice by which ancient actors assumed a role of “speaking through.” Dumas paints in a way that resists descriptive function: like Gerhard Richter, she employs the blurring techniques, and she uses oil on the canvas as if it were watercolour. The surface reveals and conceals, while holding the traces of its maker. In this painting, she draws from a photograph of one of Auguste Rodin’s mask-like plaster casts created for The Gates of Hell (1880-1917). Rodin, Dumas reminds us, drew from the Parthenon marbles, a monument he regarded as the supreme achievement of sculpture.

Dumas too engages with Greek sculptures, but she does so by staying true to her creative process, painting from photographs of sculptures. In 50+ (2010-2018), she draws from a postcard of a Roman imitation of a Hellenistic sculpture. The image shows an old woman in a reclining posture, a wine jug in hand, perhaps paying tribute to Dionysus. Dumas preserves the woman’s posture, with her head tipped back, but renders it with deeper poignancy, modulating the face into an indeterminate register, poised between agony and ecstasy.

In her own words, Marlene Dumas’s use of “second-hand images and firsthand experiences”, situates her practice in a register that feels both timeless and deeply human. The image and the lived moment unfold on different temporal planes, yet across generations we encounter the same repertoire of individual and collective emotions: fear, sorrow, desire, love. This echoes Gilles Deleuze’s insight: “the image is not in the present. […] The image itself is a set of relations of time from which the present only derives, either as a common multiple or as the smallest divisor. Relations of time are never perceived in ordinary perception, but they are in the image, as soon as it is creative. It makes relations of time—irreducible to the present—perceptible, visible.” For Deleuze, a creative image makes visible those otherwise imperceptible folds of time, irreducible to the now. Sorrow, like guilt, is one of those human emotions that can be long-lived, lingering even for a lifetime, and may push some people to find their lives no longer worth living. Whether an individual or a collective emotion, sorrow permeates the body and its stories: the past endures within the present, even as the present gestures toward the future.

Dumas, like many of her generation, often articulates the moral dilemma of guilt as a profound uncertainty over which actions can be deemed just—and in whose eyes such justice is to be recognised. She knows this from firsthand experience, having grown up in a farming town outside Cape Town. The dark years of apartheid meant that relationships with the wider world were highly politicised. She understood how classical ideals had been manipulated and conscripted by fascists and colonial regimes for their own purposes. Leni Riefenstahl’s films, Triumph of the Will (1935) or Olympia (1938), invented and propagated a Nazi aesthetics in which the idealised body became a political tool for supremacy and a heinous political agenda.

Dumas moved to Holland in 1976, after earning a degree in fine arts from the University of Cape Town. Her ambivalent relationship with Greek culture took a turning point when she came to understand its role as a culture of resistance in African countries like South Africa. On Robben Island, for instance, political prisoners—including Nelson Mandela—staged Greek tragedies. These performances became acts of resistance, allowing prisoners to endure the political oppression. In Sophocles’ Antigone, they discovered an ethic of survival against the cruelty of tyrants. This aligns with Nietzsche’s idea in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), where he conceives of tragedy as an affirmation of life’s intensity in the face of meaninglessness and absurdity—a profound antidote to pessimism.

Nevertheless, art does not eliminate pessimism, but it has the potential to transform it into something more bearable. For the show in Athens, Dumas created two new monumental paintings, Old (2025) and Phantom Age (2025). They distil key aspects of her painterly vocabulary: the insistent materiality and movement of liquid, set against contour, embodiment, and tension. Her raw paint, along with distortion and elongation, gives poignancy to the painted sphere. The fluid and the indeterminate body forms suggest how political forces circumscribe the threshold between visibility and erasure. And this is what painting does: it intervenes in life, not necessarily to console the sorrow, but to redirect or alter a person’s course.

From the raw material of the politics of sorrow, Dumas transposes the affective immediacy provoked by the image of a sufferer into a sustained mode of reception—an engagement with the image that acknowledges the temporal density of the image, its impressions and its power to affect us. Through this, and the analogous use of imagination, Dumas reminds us that enduring is not only an individual act, but a collective engagement.

View of the Exhibition Photo. Paris Tavitian © Museum of Cycladic Art

Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens, Greece

June 5–November 2, 2025

Subscribe now

Share