Het Hooghuys (Maar wie ik ben gaat niemand wat aan)

In the early 1990s, Marlene Dumas’ Black Drawings gained a counterpart in the ‘portrait gallery’ of paintings entitled Maar wie ik ben gaat niemand wat aan (But it's no one’s business who I am). The work was commissioned by the art committee at ‘’t Hooghuys’, a mental health institution in Etten-Leur, and is on long-term loan from GGZ Breburg to De Pont and Museum Het Dolhuys (now Museum of the Mind).

The series includes 36 paintings, each 60 x 50 cm, arranged into six rows of six. Amid the portraits of clients and staff, we also see pets, stuffed animals, the moon, a poem by Jan Arends and an image of the rockstar Jim Morrison, frontman of The Doors.

Dumas began the project in 1989, shortly after giving birth to her daughter. During multiple visits to ’t Hooghuys, she took pictures of residents with a Polaroid camera, keeping one photo for herself and giving one to the subject. This reciprocity reflects the goal of the commission, which was aimed at promoting human contact and equality. A group of residents even visited Dumas at her houseboat in Amsterdam.

Dumas turned the photos into empathetic portraits that blur the boundaries between patient, care employee and artist. She wanted, in her own words, to ‘depict people in terms of their complexity and never as the sum total of their identities.’ The equality in how the works are displayed suggests a kinship that defies hierarchy. The frog at the top right may refer to the fairytale in which a kiss causes a frog to turn into a prince – an image of transformation and hope.

A poem by Jan Arends – which translates as ‘I / I / am not afraid / of what is / going to happen...’ – resonates with Dumas’ chosen themes of vulnerability, identity and mortality. Arends himself spent time in psychiatric institutions before taking his own life in 1974. Portraits also remind us of our own mortality, as Dumas wrote in her notes alongside a picture of the poet: ‘Perhaps art is nothing more than a tool to help us accept death.’