Venus & Adonis

At once comic, tragic and erotic, Venus & Adonis (1593) is a poem by William Shakespeare based on passages from Ovid’s Metamorphoses . This new Dutch translation by Hafid Bouazza of Shakespeare’s text is illustrated by Marlene Dumas, with her complete suite of thirty-three works on paper reproduced throughout. The poem tells the story of Venus, the goddess of love, and her attempts to seduce the hunter Adonis. It is a complex, kaleidoscopic work in which love takes center stage – Venus’s lustful yearning for Adonis ripples throughout, each stanza and line tinged with unrequited longing. Through a series of expressive ink washes, Dumas paints new passion into the poem – bodies bleed into one another, lips part in sighs of passion. As Venus declares, “Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry, / Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.” Like Shakespeare before her, Dumas opens up a seemingly unending flow between light and dark, love and death, pleasure and pain.