Dana Schutz, Mountain Group, 2018
Dana Schutz is known for formally inventive canvases that combine figuration and abstraction to construct complex visual narratives that engage the capacity of painting to represent subjective experience. Often depicting figures in seemingly impossible, enigmatic, or invented situations, her expressive canvases convey emotions and psychological states of mind that reveal the complications, tensions, and ambiguities of contemporary life.
As Peter Schjeldahl notes, Schutz “vivifies present conditions of life on a faltering planet as dramatically as an artist can while staying devoted to aesthetic ideals.” She achieves this through her singular approach to the medium of painting. Schjeldahl continues, “Painting wet-in-wet with oils, building thick and eventful surfaces, she creates allegories of uncertain but torrid, gnashing implication, a bit like the enigmatic narratives of the German modern master Max Beckmann, but less solemn. She does this with almost preposterously extraordinary gifts for composition, paint handling, and, in particular, color, suffusing clashes of hue and tone with ghostly essences of a chromatic unity that you feel rather than quite see.”1
Schutz was born in 1976 in Livonia, Michigan, and received her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art, Ohio and her MFA from Columbia University, New York. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
A major solo exhibition of the artist’s work is currently on view at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark, through June 2023. The presentation will subsequently travel to Musée d'art moderne de Paris.
Recent solo museum exhibitions of Schutz’s work include Dana Schutz: Eating Atom Bombs held at the Transformer Station, Cleveland, Ohio (2018), which debuted a series of paintings by the artist; an exhibition of new work at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2017); a career survey at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2015); and a comprehensive solo exhibition at The Hepworth Wakefield, England (2013), that traveled to the kestnergesellschaft, Hannover, Germany (2014).
In 2011, the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York presented Dana Schutz: If the Face Had Wheels, a retrospective featuring paintings and drawings created by the artist over the previous decade. The show subsequently traveled to the Miami Art Museum and the Denver Art Museum in 2012–2013.
The artist’s work has been the subject of additional solo presentations at institutions worldwide, among them the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (2012); Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Georgia (2011); Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2010); and Museo d’arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Italy (2010). In 2006, the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts presented Dana Schutz: Paintings 2002–2005 which, later that same year, traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, Ohio. The artist’s first solo museum presentation was held in 2004 at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Johnson Community College, Overland Park, Kansas.
A major monograph was published by Rizzoli in 2010 that surveys Schutz’s painted works and includes an essay by art historian and critic Barry Schwabsky.
Schutz’s work is held in numerous public collections, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museo d’arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Italy; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Rubell Museum, Miami; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Kansas; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
1 Peter Schjeldahl, “Dana Schutz’s Paintings Wring Beauty from Worldwide Calamity.” The New Yorker (January 21, 2019).
February 9 – June 6, 2023
In her works, Dana Schutz has moved from chaotic-claustrophobic scenes – especially linked to youth and typically with single figures – towards increasingly complex motifs, populated by numerous actors.
The exhibition will present several of these very large paintings, where groups of people e.g. fight for the top of a mountain, try to survive in a boat on the high seas, or have ventured out in a group with rafts in an attempt to beat the sun.
The exhibition presents both paintings, drawings and graphics as well as sculpture and provides an overview of her entire career spanning two decades. It is accompanied by a Louisiana Revy and by an international catalog in English. Subsequently, the exhibition will be shown at the MAM, Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris.
Learn more at The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.
Dana Schutz, The Ventriloquist, 2021 (detail)
Over the last two decades, Dana Schutz has become known for complex canvases that convey emotions and psychological states and reveal the complications, tensions, and ambiguities of contemporary life.
This online presentation debuts five new paintings, also on view at Frieze New York, and brings you inside the artist’s studio process. Conceived together, these large-scale canvases depict various figures navigating post-calamitous situations and expand on Schutz’s singular, wholly inventive approach to both subject matter and painting.
David Zwirner is pleased to announce the representation of the New York–based artist Dana Schutz. The artist will continue to work with Thomas Dane Gallery in London, where she has a solo exhibition currently on view, and Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin.
Schutz is known for formally inventive canvases that combine figuration and abstraction to construct complex visual narratives that engage the capacity of painting to represent subjective experience. Often depicting figures in seemingly impossible, enigmatic, or invented situations, her expressive works convey emotions and psychological states of mind that reveal the complications, tensions, and ambiguities of contemporary life.
As Peter Schjeldahl notes, Schutz “vivifies present conditions of life on a faltering planet as dramatically as an artist can while staying devoted to aesthetic ideals.” She achieves this through her singular approach to the medium of painting. Schjeldahl continues, “Painting wet-in-wet with oils, building thick and eventful surfaces, she creates allegories of uncertain but torrid, gnashing implication, a bit like the enigmatic narratives of the German modern master Max Beckmann, but less solemn. She does this with almost preposterously extraordinary gifts for composition, paint handling, and, in particular, color, suffusing clashes of hue and tone with ghostly essences of a chromatic unity that you feel rather than quite see.”1
A new work by Dana Schutz will be in David Zwirner’s upcoming 20/20 group exhibition in New York, opening on October 29.
Image: Dana Schutz, Lumberjacks, 2020 (detail)
1 Peter Schjeldahl, “Dana Schutz’s Paintings Wring Beauty from Worldwide Calamity.” The New Yorker, January 21, 2019.