In Marlene Dumas' mid-career retrospective of 150 canvases at the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art, the South Africa-born artist re-introduces powerful emotions into realist painting with chilling bluntness. In works like Leather Boots , a painting from the artist's Strippinggirls series, Dumas' washy application of paint heightens the lurid sexuality of a naked, crouching woman in leather boots. In Broken White , a new work, a closely cropped image of a pale, averted face conceals whether the subject's expression derives from pain or from ecstasy. Like Dumas' earlier Death of the Author — in which the pallid head of a corpse is partially obscured by a white sheet — the subtle conflation of death and eroticism electrifies the blanched colors that bleed across Dumas' canvases.

-ASA