‘Art may be a pact with the devil’: the great Marlene Dumas on her darkly provocative art

She pours or even tosses paint on to a canvas – to see where it takes her. The results range from myths to massacres, bound heads to Satan. In a rare interview, the great artist reveals what drives her

‘To paint is an apology for painting,” writes Marlene Dumas, in the introductory essay to her new show Mourning Marsyas. Discuss, I want to insist, as if her comment were an exam question. But before we can make any headway, she’s leading me from painting to painting, around Frith Street Gallery in London. There’s one of a rock that looks like a face. Other faces, stoic in grief and resilience, stare back. Elsewhere, there’s a looming timeless head called Nemesis that looks like it is out to get me. Figures and faces emerge from pours of paint that have provoked them into life. Some appear the work of an instant, others have been reworked. There are uneasy figures in rooms, awkward confrontations, paintings called War and Ceasefire. Some paintings allude obliquely to current conflicts, to terrible incidents, domestic dramas and personal distress. Others are closer to mythological nightmares. The devil’s in there too. We’ll come to him.

Based in Amsterdam since the 1970s, the South African painter has held major exhibitions at MoMA in New York and throughout Europe, including Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Her travelling retrospective, The Image as Burden, came to Tate Modern in London 10 years ago. In her long career, Dumas has painted babies, children and the very old. She has painted women masturbating, vulvas and cocks. She has painted the disgraced music producer Phil Spector, Osama bin Laden and Pauline Opango Lumumba, widow of the assassinated Congolese premier Patrice Lumumba.