Tag: ecstasy

Marlene Dumas, Lucy, 2004

Lucy is a large, nearly square-format painting showing the face of somebody lying down, seen at a three-quarter angle. Enlarged to giant proportions, and filling almost the entire picture frame, the subject’s face, neck and shoulder are made up of large areas of blank canvas suggesting the blankness of dead flesh. The face has no features which identify it as either male or female. The eyes are shut and the mouth has fallen open, as though in the relaxation of death. Dumas used touches of the same yellow paint around the subject’s nose and mouth that she used to depict her blonde hair, adding to the sense of bloodless and lifeless flesh. The subject’s pose – her head thrown to one side – and her name, the title of the painting, are derived from a painting by Michelangelo Caravaggio (1571–1610) entitled The Burial of St Lucy

In the early years of the first millennium, the Christian martyr Saint Lucy of Syracuse was punished for refusing to marry a pagan, first by being consigned to a brothel, before being tortured, having her eyes torn out and finally being stabbed in the throat. Dumas retained fidelity to the story by depicting a vivid gash in her neck.

Lucy is one of a group of paintings exhibited under the title The Second Coming, many of which depict figures lying prone in ambiguous states of sleep, death or sexual ecstasy. Three similarly scaled large canvases showed close-ups of corpses’ faces.