Marlene Dumas: open-end

The Pinault Collection is presenting “open-end,” a solo exhibition of Marlene Dumas, on view at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice now through August 1. Dumas’s “open-end” is the artist’s first comprehensive solo show in Italy, curated in collaboration with Caroline Bourgeois. It brings together over 100 works from the Pinault Collection, international museums, and private collections, focusing on recent work created with the Venetian exhibition in mind, and broadened by a selection of paintings and drawings created as early as 1984. The title was Dumas’s choosing; it reflects both the openness of her work to ongoing interpretation and the opening of exhibition spaces to the public after lockdowns, while the ongoing pandemic invests “end” with a “fluid and melancholic” meaning. In both respects, Dumas said, “Where the work starts is not where it ends.”