Dana Schutz was readying her coming gallery show, and chaos reigned on the walls of her Brooklyn studio. Her new works offered the painter’s signature scenes of anxiety and mayhem.
In “Presenter,” a female speaker at a TED-style event, with her underwear down around her ankles, tried to pull her own face off. “Treadmill” depicted a woman with a fishlike head flailing away on an exercise machine. And in “Painting in an Earthquake” an artist in front of a canvas held a brush as a brick wall before her shook violently.
“She’s trying to hold the room together, and the painting is falling,” Ms. Schutz said of that figure.