Yet a really good strip is never fun(ny).
It’s hard to find, but when you do, you don’t laugh.
You shiver, a memory of ancient origin. Salomé’s erotic dance drove the king to give her whatever she asked. When the seventh veil fell, after all was said and done, she asked for the head of John the Baptist: a Bible story showing the power of desire. Not love, but desire. Do Anton and I look at girls stripping in a similar manner? 
I am the sister and he is the son of a preacher man.

Marlene Dumas’ paintings have an uncanny quality in their immediacy – as art historian Matthias Winzen has suggested, Dumas’ paintings blossom where language ceases to provide adequate means of understanding or interpreting feelings. Night Nurse, 1998-2000 is a superb expression of Dumas’ painterly style both in form and content. Collaborating with her friend, and fellow artist, Anton Corbijn, Dumas set out to paint a series of works depicting prostitutes working the Red Light District of her adopted hometown of Amsterdam. Dumas’ source material for the strippinggirls series is in alignment with a career long penchant for addressing the visually disorienting or emotionally bewildering. Nudity, sexuality and displaced eroticism are familiar themes for Dumas. The artist revels in confronting these and other delicate or taboo themes, presenting the subject directly, without buffer or pretense, forcing the viewer to examine them head-on. Often calling on allusions to myth or fairy tale or art historical references, Dumas encourages the viewer to take pause in order to first examine the work as it appears in front of them, and second, to look inward at their own preconceived notions of the narrative that they conjure.

In Night Nurse Dumas depicts her subject standing full frontal, arms sheathed in over-the-elbow black gloves, hands powerfully fisted on her hips, resting her weight on one leg. She stands clothed, but only just barely so – her undergarments skewed to one side, the lace wraps of her high-heels creeping up her legs like kudzu. The only element of the painting that relates it to any sort of medical or care environ is the blaze of the red background, which here invokes less an emergency symbol and more the fire of lust. At once clarifying and obscuring the readings of her paintings, Dumas gives titles genuine consideration. "Titles give direction to the way a picture is looked at." (Marlene Dumas, quoted in Paul Andriesse, The Eyes of the Night Creatures, exh. cat., Galerie Paul Andriesse, Amsterdam, 1985, p. 19) Helping the viewer to move outside the hurdle of tormented incomprehensibility, Dumas' titles shape the viewer’s perceptions and contribute to a more expansive understanding of what initially may seem to be a very blatant picture. Indeed, even while often presenting a witty and sophisticated form of navigation, her titles also underscore the ambiguity of the image. Much of the power of her compositions is in their suggestive (versus literal) visual impact. So enigmatic a painting as Night Nurse “suggests all sorts of narratives, but it doesn't really tell you what's going on at all. Someone said that it feels as if something has happened, in the sense of an after-event, or alternatively that something's going to happen but you don't yet know what it is. It's as if I can make people think they are so close to me - that they believe I've addressed the painting directly to them. I give them a false sense of intimacy. I think the world invites you to have a conversation with it.” (Marlene Dumas, quoted in Barbara Bloom, “Interview”, Marlene Dumas, London: Phaidon, 1999, p. 12)