Marlene Dumas/ Juan Muñoz: Drawings, Frith Street Gallery

Prepare to be immersed, as Spanish artist Juan Muñoz and South African born Marlene Dumas explore the infinite ways in which the body can communicate, both with you, and with its status across the history of art.
Juan Muñoz is best known for his cast sculptures and drawings of the figure which are at once personal and ambiguous in their realism and inaccuracies. With major exhibitions and a retrospective at Tate Modern, London in 2008, Muñoz is thought to have greatly extended the language of sculpture through groups of ambiguous monochrome figures in the late 1980s.
In this Frith Street Gallery exhibition, you’ll find a selection of Muñoz’s drawings of the mouth. Emerging from the shadows, the jaws pull you into conversation and, as the curators suggest, “from silent laughter to…whispered conversations, [sound] becomes present by its very absence.”
In comparison to Muñoz’s images, Dumas is well known for her paintings which engage with the complexities of human form, critiquing ideas of racial, sexual and social identity. Her drawings start with figures found in newspapers, historical paintings and personal memorabilia, before being stripped of their identities, to communicate a complex variety of emotions through form and colour.
With her largest ever retrospective opening at Tate, Marlene Dumas is one to watch in 2015. This quieter London art show at Frith Street offers a chance to catch the prominent painter away from the crowds.
Don’t miss this surprising and intimate dialogue with the human body across time and media.