Tate Modern: The puzzle of Dumas

The new Tate retrospective for South African-born painter Marlene Dumas calls to mind the signing of a fancy foreign footballer to play in the Premier League.

She comes with a big reputation and even bigger price tag (in 2005 her canvas The Victor sold for £3.1-million, making her the most expensive female artist alive).

But don't expect a barrel of laughs. In the joy and jubilation stakes, her work is about as far removed as it gets from Matisse's charming cutouts, on show at Tate last year. Dumas's subjects range from monstrous newborns and terrorists to murdered children and bodies in morgues.

Most often her work is figurative and her starting point a photograph - whether one from the media or her own camera. Yet Dumas insists her paintings aren't straight depictions. She blurs rather than focuses, deploying an array of abbreviations, stains and occasional velvety patches. Her figures never feel quite committed to being figures; they err towards the abstract and allegory.

In Waiting (For Meaning), a recumbent black woman stretches out on what looks like a bed. Is she "waiting" for a partner to complete the sexual act? Or might she actually be a corpse on a catafalque? Either way, she's helplessly exposed and we're left to think of Snow White awaiting her prince or, more metaphorically, Christ his resurrection.

With Dumas, nothing is explicit. The experience of seeing her figures has been compared to tuning into a radio station but never quite getting the perfect signal.

For some, she is a saviour of painting, proof that, in a world awash with imagery, painting can still move, haunt.

However, there's always some know-all curator ready to come along and "explain" it. Thankfully, that curator isn't at Tate Modern. This show's approach is to let Dumas's work speak for itself - there's little wall text to speak of, beyond short quotes from the artist.

Born in 1953, in the then small town of Kuils River near Cape Town, she was educated at an Afrikaans school before moving to Holland in the late 1970s . Her work has often been seen through the prism of apartheid, as if she were always passing comment. Dumas rejects such a reductive outlook, but there's no doubt the Africa of her youth has infused her art.

Take Black Drawings, a grid featuring depictions of 112 different black people. They're derived from old colonial photographs of Africans taken by Europeans in the early 20th century, and each subject has a highly distinctive expression. Dumas is, you sense, emphasising individuality in the face of a systemic (grid-like) history that has treated Africans as a monolithic mass.

The artist herself, though, stresses her aim wasn't political but simply to deploy black ink aesthetically.

In recent years she appears to be an artist whose inspiration has run dry: hence her decision to start depicting celebrities, from Amy Winehouse and Phil Spector to Osama bin Laden.

The sense is of Dumas suddenly relying on slam-dunk subjects, rather than her way with the brush, to make an impression.

• 'Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden', at Tate Modern, London, until May 10, tate.org.uk