7. Marlene Dumas – The Image as Burden, 1993
This 1993 painting by South African born artist Marlene Dumas (born 1953) is derived from a still from the 1936 classic film Camille starring Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor. In translating the black and white still into painting, Dumas transformed its appearance and meaning to create a deliberately ambiguous subject, removed from its narrative context. The postures of the figures recall the pieta, in which the Virgin Mary cradles the lifeless body of Christ – only here, the roles are reversed.