Marlene Dumas at the Louvre

The Louvre has recently acquired Liaisons (2025), a cycle of nine paintings by Marlene Dumas (South Africa, 1953).

While other selected contemporary artists, such as Anselm Kiefer, François Morellet, and Cy Twombly, have previously been invited to conceive a permanent work for the Museum, Dumas is the first contemporary woman artist to enter the Louvre’s collection: a decision that not only represents a further expansion of the museum’s temporal boundaries but also an important updating of its institutional, art-historical, and museographic canon, integrating a contemporary perspective and helping to redefine the narrative of the museum’s heritage.

Installation View, Marlene Dumas: Liaisons (2025). Courtesy musée du Louvre. Photo: Anton Corbijn

Conceived as a site-specific commission for the monumental atrium wall inside the Porte des Lions - a threshold to both the painting galleries and the Gallery of Five Continents - the series responds directly to the architectural and historical conditions of the space.

Liaisons consists of nine paintings representing faces, each measuring approximately 175 x 163 cm. Each canvas corresponds in scale to the marble bas-reliefs that once occupied the wall, establishing a deliberate dialogue with the Louvre’s sculptural past.

Rendered in acidic chromatic registers, ranging from fluorescent greens to neon yellows, usual in the artist's practice, the faces depicted are distorted, oscillating between the grotesque and the spectral. After pouring a mixture of oil paint directly onto the canvas, Dumas quickly outlined the features of each face using a brush while the paint layers were still wet.

In conversation with Donatien Grau, Head of Contemporary Programs at the musée du Louvre, the artist said, "I recognize my own feelings of alienation. These faces are not heroes to admire or to reject. That is neither a good nor a bad quality. They seem to be part of our collective unconscious. The temperature of their colours leads us to imagine that their roots are embedded in the combination of the four elements, earth, water, air, and fire."

For her Louvre project, she channeled a poetics of melancholia and trauma, drawing visual sources both from the recently inaugurated collection of the Galerie des Cinq Continents (which brings together, thematically, artistic and anthropological artifacts from the ancient civilizations of Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Oceania) and contemporary Paris, ritually mixing various cultural archetypes.

Marlene Dumas: Liaisons. Bronze Mars (2025). Courtesy musée du Louvre. Photo: Peter Cox, Eindhoven

This acquisition is significant on multiple levels.

Institutionally, it constitutes a symbolic and material recalibration of the Louvre’s canon, addressing long-standing gender exclusions while opening the collection to a female contemporary practice.

From a curatorial and museographic perspective, the commission model allows Dumas’s work to engage with the museum not as an external commentary but as an internal interlocutor, activating the very elements that define the commission itself - namely its placement, architectural history, and monumental scale - as critical tools.

Finally, from an art-historical standpoint, Liaisons situates Dumas’s investigation of the human figure, trauma, and power relations within the framework of a global art history, prompting a dialogue between the museum’s ambitions and the cultural stratifications that have shaped its narrative.

From December 2025, the work will be on permanent display and accessible to the public.