The naked truth behind the canvas

"Words and images drink the same wine. There is no purity to protect," South African artist Marlene Dumas once said, echoing her paintings. "Open-End," her solo show at Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 2022, was a revelation touching upon two themes that are intrinsically linked to the Italian city: love and death.

Dumas was equally brash in her most recent show at the Frith Street Gallery in London, "Mourning Marsyas," a frenzied dance of emotions that commented on the freedom of man and the cruelty of the gods, and included the piece "Two Gods," depicting two monumental phalluses.

There aren't too many painters who explore erotic subjects and even fewer who do so in a way that is truly sensuous, without bordering on the pornographic. The human nude, usually female, and an art school staple, has been rendered in the visual arts again and again in a hedonistic light. Such...