My highlight: Marlene Dumas

Colm Tóibín finds stark beauty in the South African-born painter’s dreamlike imagesThere is a lovely tension and ambiguity in the work of Marlene Dumas that makes her images mysterious and worthy of close scrutiny. On the one hand, she seems unsure about painting itself and what images mean in an age saturated with images. She is engaged emotionally and intellectually with the history of the icon and the photograph. She knows how weak and uneasy painting can seem compared with the brash powe