The Visitor

Marlene Dumas’s 1995 painting The Visitor depicts a group of prostitutes before an open door, the titular visitor obscured from view. Dumas often uses photographic sources in her work, many of which are taken from contemporary news reportage documenting events taking place in different parts of the world. The photographic source for The Visitor was an image taken in a brothel in Nevada, USA, circa 1960. Dumas’s painting featured in the 2007 Hayward Gallery exhibition The Painting of Modern Life.