The Louvre announces the entrance in its collections of Liaisons, a work by Marlene Dumas, commissioned for the Porte des Lions

At the invitation of the Louvre, Marlene Dumas created Liaisons, a work consisting of nine paintings conceived for the vast wall of the Porte des Lions atrium. The dimensions of the canvases match those of the marble bas-reliefs that once hung on this wall. Liaisons thus becomes part of the history of the Louvre and its museography. It also fits into the history of large-scale painted décors, artistic interventions, and in situ commissions in museum spaces.

Marlene Dumas designed Liaisons for this space, located at the entrance to the Gallery of the Five Continents and the Louvre’s painting department, close to the Grande Galerie. This proximity to renowned masterpieces of painting takes on particular significance given that the artist’s work is deeply rooted in this medium, constantly combining sources and stories, much like the musée du Louvre itself.

These “liaisons,” a title given by the artist based on a word that exists in both French and English, are those that link territories to one another and people to one another, reflecting a sensitive and emotional relationship to art as a fragment of humanity, with an implicit romantic resonance.
Liaisons demonstrates the artist’s remarkable virtuosity and technique, which is both free and precise. Some of these faces are more abstract, others more gestural, and some reflect rather the traces of drawings. Each of the nine panels retains its individuality and assumes its unique status within the ensemble. Marlene Dumas conceived this series with the museum’s spirit in mind: the Louvre as a place to encounter and be in the presence of works of art, to to bring those in converssation.
Over the years, Marlene Dumas has continually cited, referenced, and incorporated works from the Louvre into her own art. Her creative process brings together images from her archive and shifts them into the pictorial realm ; in making this work, she has set no limits on the type and the form of her inspirations from the collections. She works from pre-existing images and combines the texture of painting with a profound reflection on the history of art and forms.

Marlene Dumas is one of the greatest painters of our time. When we were thinking about a work for the entrance to the Portes des Lions, which is both the access to the Gallery of the Five Continents and the Department of Paintings, she seemed the obvious choice: she defends and illustrates the medium of painting like few others, and her work is conceived as a space for bringing together different sensibilities and origins. That is exactly what we aimed for to do with this redesigned space. We are proud of the outcome of this magnificent project. Marlene Dumas’ work is a repertoire of ways of painting and drawing, as well as an invitation to confront our humanity » 

Laurence des Cars,
President-director of the musée du Louvre

Marlene Dumas Biography 

Marlene Dumas (born in South Africa in 1953) has lived and worked in Amsterdam for over forty years. From her birth in South Africa, she has retained a particular interest in marginalized figures and their representations, to which she has paid tribute in her striking works. A virtuoso painter, she has continually pushed the boundaries of her medium, engaging in dialogue with photography and even sculpture. Her work is featured in major public and private collections. She has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in the world’s most prestigious museums, including a 2001 survey of drawings at the Centre Georges Pompidou.
Marlene Dumas is also known for a series of dialogues with art history, manifested in exhibitions at the Munch Museum (2018), the Musée d’Orsay (2021-2022), and the Museum of Cycladic Art (2025). She has also produced series of illustrations for Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen.

Conversation between Marlene Dumas and Donatien Grau, head of contemporary programs at the musée du Louvre

What does the Louvre represent to you?
I was a stranger to art museums for quite a long time. Being born in 1953 in South Africa and living there until my 23rd year, I did not grow up with the Louvre as an actual museum to visit. It existed only in the art history books of my Fine Art studies at the University of Cape Town (1972–1975), but at that time I was interested only in modern art. I thought of the Louvre, with its famous idealised females, The Mona Lisa and The Venus de Milo, mainly as a faraway, awesome place for older people who liked looking at the European history of the dead. It felt unrelated to me.
But when I came to further my studies in the Netherlands in 1976, a change began. In 1985, I sent my mother a postcard of the Winged Victory of Samothrace. I commented on the many sculptures of angels in France, while in South Africa the only angels in stone were in graveyards. I wrote that I had seen a masterpiece in the Louvre: “A big, big painting with beautiful colours and emotions by Delacroix. Now that’s art!” It was The Massacre of Chios. Delacroix was no longer from a finished past but felt contemporary. His work influenced my paintings. The Louvre became also a fortress and a palace with links to Marie Antoinette and the guillotines of the French Revolution. In 2005, I painted ’the skull’ of Charlotte Corday, who assassinated Marat in his bath. Everything is related to everything else, as a wise man once said.
The Louvre thus represents for me not only the art history of the so-called West, with its beauties and its inhumanities, but also the value of preserving and sharing humanity’s collective history and interrelations.

When looking at the nine paintings you made, we can see faces. They are all different and difficult to pin down. Where do they come from?
When you ask someone like me, who is 72 years of age, where these faces come from, I can give you an endless variety of answers, and all would be fragments of the truth, while the most honest answer would be: I don’t really know. I know the images that I looked at and the information I gathered, but what really remained, and what was lost? They definitely do not come from one place only. One of my earliest artworks, in the late 1970s, was a collage made of torn-out pieces from the beginnings and endings of love letters. It was called Don’t Talk to Strangers. The title was meant ironically, as I believe that through art you talk to strangers, and to the dead. I can’t help thinking of L’Étranger by Albert Camus (1942) and Meursault, contre-enquête by Kamel Daoud (2013). These are associations that came afterwards, not beforehand. But then, my thinking has always been chaotic and not in chronological order.
My faces are a mixture of the past and the present. I cannot paint the horrors of the ongoing genocides of our times directly, but their shadows did affect the mood under which these faces were made. Portraiture deals with likeness and the recognition of people known. Faces deal with the nameless. They include those dehumanized, like fugitives, branded as aliens. Speaking as an old existentialist, 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. They try to vibrate, to energise their viewers, but realise that they cannot compete with the faraway stars in the sky, they are so hot that they burn all the time.

They all seem to manifest a particular way of painting, more drawing-like, more gestural… It looks like a manifestation of the many forms painting can take. Would you agree?
In Liaisons, painting and drawing are one, not to be separated. I never make sketches beforehand of how a painting should look. Drawing is not a foreplay for painting. Painting is fusion.
Each of these nine paintings started with me pouring a mixture of diluted oil paint onto a stretched and pre-primed canvas, laid down on a low table, and then lifting the canvas slightly to move the wet paint around until some sort of overall shape had settled. I am like a dancing partner in a game of chance, where the paint is allowed to go its own way, but then again, not all the way. The textures of the skin-like surfaces are quite unpredictable, as I am impatient when mixing the oil colours with turpentine. This results in uneven patches. I like the physicality and the contrasts. Onto this backdrop, the features of a face were drawn with concentrated speed, sometimes while the paint was still wet and smudged with a piece of paper, sometimes later with a brush. Some needed more layers and also more time. Each one is different and has its own character.

I tried to make them appear as clear and simple as possible, since they have to be visible from such a long distance. They speak about the viewing of faces and the ambiguity of expressions, but at the same time about showing the many forms or ways of painting. Keeping the spirit of the paint as performance alive.

What role did the Louvre collections and the Gallery of the Five Continents play in the making of this work?
Not only paintings but also sculptural works of the Louvre have inspired me in the past. The experience of Michelangelo’s Dying Slave was both heartbreaking and erotic. In recent years, I have used images without even realising that these objects were also part of the collection of the Louvre, like the relief of the goddess Ishtar on a Mesopotamian relief vase for my painting Birth (2018), or the sculpture of the satyr Hanging Marsyas for my painting Mourning Marsyas (2024). These works show love, war, and politics, all represented in a single figure, reminding me of my favourite film by Alain Resnais, with a script by Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959).
For the project in the Louvre, I first concentrated on the works I knew from visiting the gallery when it was still only of four continents. At the same time, I gathered newspaper clippings of the Paris of today. The art that touches me most always has a ritualistic core and displays a mixture of fear and wonder regarding the world outside and the worlds inside of us. I once spoke of my art as being prayers for protection. To paint is to exorcise fear, to struggle between freedom and fate.
To make a figure, a face, to put on a mask, to transform ourselves, to travel in time, to imagine things never seen, this is something that has been done since the beginning of time, in all cultures of all ages. I have looked at images of ancient objects as ideas for faces, but I never forced a likeness. A guardian oceanic figure turned out, in my version, closer to Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs or to The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas, depending on which films the viewer has seen.
I painted a light blue face where, for me, the French philosopher Bataille meets the ecstasy of the Spanish mystic nun Teresa, through the Italian sculptor Bernini, reflecting a drug-induced trip in the film Climax by the French director Gaspar Noé. Meanings are like ghosts, only to be seen by those who believe in them.

This work is titled Liaisons. Can you explain the meaning of this title?
Through the years I have often used erotic metaphors to speak about art. Artworks function like sensual bodies, trying to seduce viewers to fall in love with them, while knowing that they can never be true to only one perspective. The works are also not bound to the intentions of their maker. They will ’betray’ the artist as soon as a more attractive or powerful meaning is presented to them. The nine paintings form unreliable relationships among themselves, resulting in changes of character depending on their placement on the wall or when ’coupled’ with another painting. They prefer to suggest rather than to define. They keep secrets.
I have not read the French novel Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) by Choderlos de Laclos, but I have seen the film Dangerous Liaisons (1988) by Stephen Frears, with its web of intricate affairs. And I wanted a title that did not need translation.

What do you think the reaction of viewers will be ?
I cannot predict the average reactions of viewers, as each carries their own personal burdens and baggage of experience with them. And for me, this is also not familiar ground, to make paintings this large and hang them this high. Intimacy fits me better. I prefer to look at paintings up close, to engage with the marks and gestures that have made them come to be, to be aware of their materiality as objects, while entering their metaphysical reality. Hopefully one will still be able to feel that, even without seeing the details. I do think some will say about me, “Why her, and why here?!” And I will answer, “Because she asked me.” You do not wish to say no when Laurence des Cars asks you.