Einder (Horizon)

When my mother was alive I never painted flowers for her. After her death, in 2007, I tried to paint the flowers on her grave. I wanted to paint a portrait of her without painting her. I was trying to paint something that had no end.
(MD 2021) 

The title comes from an Afrikaans poem by Elizabeth Eybers, in which the word “einder" suggests both “the end”, and a horizon one cannot reach.

In Einder (Horizon), a tall bouquet of flowers bursting with rich colours emerges, as if floating, from a nocturnal vision with bluish highlights. 

In most of her paintings, Marlene Dumas depicts naked humanity plagued by its desires and fears. In contrast, this one stands out by its modesty and rejection of human affect. Is it a kind of vanitas with flowers, as in Flemish art, immersed in the solitude of a night landscape? In addition to an underlying reflexive dimension to be deciphered, the work unfolds like a work of pure painting, notable both for its play of materials and its chromatic subtleties.

Marlene Dumas’s Einder (Horizon) was shown for the first time by the Pinault Collection during the exhibition "Mapping the Studio" (2009-2011) at the Punta della Dogana and Palazzo Grassi in Venice.