Dec. 12 (Bloomberg) -- A kiss is not always just a kiss for the painter Marlene Dumas. It can be the picture of death -- or one way to show a love for life.

In her first retrospective in the U.S., “Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave,” opening Sunday at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the South African-born expressionist has it both ways at once.

A canvas ironically titled “The Kiss” (2003) is almost too small to contain the head that has fallen flat on its bleached- out face.

The eyes are closed, while the slightly parted lips press the ground, as does the nose. It’s impossible to know if these features belong to a man or woman, but easy to see this person has been knocked down for the count.

The dead, the dying and the grieving are a central subject for Dumas, though her portraits give equal time to newborns, strippers, prisoners, prostitutes and herself.

It’s not exactly holiday fare. Yet the show, with 70 paintings and 35 works on paper expertly organized by Cornelia Butler, is more hypnotic than depressing.

Dumas, who is 55 and left her native Capetown for Amsterdam in 1976 during apartheid, doesn’t condemn humanity so much as elevate the conditions it seeks to escape, be they physical, psychological or political.

Isolated Figures

Working from news photographs as well as her own snapshots and Polaroids, Dumas takes on Big Themes -- sex, death, birth, race, motherhood -- without sensationalizing or sentimentalizing them.

Her figures are anonymous but unmistakable, isolated in extreme close-up on monochromatic backgrounds and distinguished by blurred edges, bleeding veils of paint and physical characteristics that she distorts for emotional effect without resorting to caricature.

The show’s first gallery is dominated by paintings of big heads. One is a demonic version of a Gerber baby. Two others are adult women lying face-up, in profile.

One is pictured from the side and slightly below, as if the viewer were lying in the crook of the figure’s arm. But what looks at first like a gaping wound in her pale throat turns out to be the nipple in one breast.

The image is startling but so, for different reasons, is a portrait of a three-legged boy with a bowl haircut and the profile of a squatting, black-booted prostitute radiantly backlit against the window where she is advertising herself, her hands between her legs.

Public Responds

Obviously, Dumas is not afraid to be explicit on the subject of sex or racial differences. It’s hard to think of another contemporary painter who regularly elicits so intense a response from her public.

That’s one reason she is among the very few living female artists whose paintings command upwards of $3 million at auction.

One of her most provocative watercolors is of a male nude, taken from a pornographic source, bending over to display his sexual attributes. A similar view of a masturbating female figure wants attention even more.

The female figures here make the deepest impression -- and the single portraits have it all over the few group pictures included.

A bridal party seems utterly banal, for example, against the standing nude of a middle-age woman whose flushed cheeks and bright eyes give her away as the town drunk.

Female Forms

Though Dumas is not overtly feminist, a female sensibility runs palpably through the show probably because of its emphasis on babies, as well as pregnant or nursing women.

Even the figure bowing over a table in the show’s title painting seems female, though we don’t see the face or figure clearly. Painted in a documentary-style black and white, the figure’s outstretched arms suggest both suffering and solace.

If the dead don’t look much different than the living here, it is because the departed have only one expression. Like Dumas’s haunting art, it is likely to remain in the mind long after the bearer is gone.

“Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave” is on through Feb. 16 at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd St. Info: +1- 212-708-9400 or http://www.moma.org. The exhibition travels to The Menil Collection in Houston, opening March 26.

(Linda Yablonsky is an art critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this review: Linda Yablonsky in New York at fabyab@earthlink.net.

Last Updated: December 12, 2008 00:00 EST