Marlene Dumas’ paintings illuminate the Louvre’s Porte des Lions

A new dialogue between past and present unfolds at the Louvre with Liaisons, a monumental series of Marlene Dumas paintings commissioned for the museum’s iconic Porte des Lions atrium.

A landmark moment for Marlene Dumas’ paintings

From December 2025, the Musée du Louvre unveils Liaisons — nine large-scale Marlene Dumas paintings created specifically for the museum’s newly redesigned entrance to the Gallery of the Five Continents and the Department of Paintings. Conceived as both homage and confrontation, Dumas’s installation transforms the vast wall of the Porte des Lions into a poetic meeting point between centuries of art and the contemporary human condition.

The project marks a historic first: Marlene Dumas becomes the first living woman artist to enter the Louvre’s permanent collection. Her work joins the lineage of monumental painted décors and in situ commissions that define the museum’s dialogue between tradition and innovation.

Inside the architecture of emotion

At the heart of Liaisons lies Dumas’ exploration of connections between people, continents, histories and artistic legacies. Each canvas evokes the dimensions of the marble bas-reliefs that once adorned the walls, reimagining their presence through a painterly approach. Some portraits appear as abstract traces; others as raw gestures. Together, they form an ensemble of human expressions caught between the personal and the universal.

Dumas conceived the series with the Louvre’s spirit in mind — a place of encounters, where artworks converse across time. The artist’s nuanced approach merges her deep engagement with art history and her instinctive use of painting as a medium of empathy. The result is a visual meditation on likeness and otherness, identity and alienation, rendered in muted yet powerful tones.