Dana Schutz (b.1976) is a painter in New York.
She graduated with a BFA the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2000 and an MFA from Columbia University in 2002. She grew up in Livonia, Michigan a suburb of Detroit and graduated in 1995 from Adlai E. Stevenson High School (Livonia, Michigan).
Her work is present in many of the major museums in North America and Europe, as well as in several important private collections. A number of her works are in the Saatchi Gallery and a large canvas titled "How we cured the plague, 2007" is currently on display in the permanent collection of the prestigious Mart Museum (Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Trento e Rovereto) in Italy [1]. She exhibits at Zach Feuer Gallery in New York and at Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin. Her first European solo show, Self Eaters and the People Who Love Them, was in Paris's Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin. Her bright, fantastical works have been compared to Currin, Goya, and Katz.
In an article on Schutz, Mei Chin wrote that "dissection and dismemberment abound in Dana Schutz's work, all offset by sunny colors and a pert sense of humor. Among other things, she has created a race of people who eat themselves; a guy called Frank who is the last man on Earth; a gravity-phobic person who has tied herself to the ground; and a variety of characters that are spliced, for different reasons, on operating tables. Schutz loves to give her characters life and then cut them up. Yet hers is a blithe cruelty, the curiosity of a child playing at being a creator. Even when she hates, she does it with whimsy." [1] When asked where she comes up with her fantastical subject matter, she has said that, "The paintings are not autobiographical. Only recently have I started painting some of the things in my life. I respond to what I think is happening in the world. The hypotheticals in the paintings can act as surrogates or narratives for phenomena that I feel are happening in culture. In the paintings, I think in terms of adjectives and adverbs. Often I will get information from people or things that I see, a phrase, or how one object relates to another. I construct the paintings as I go along." [1] She discussed working on her Self Eaters series, and described her imaginative approach: "I was thinking of the paintings as real artifacts from that invented situation. As the series was going on, I questioned whether I should fictionalize my role as the artist." [1]
In an essay for Schutz' catalog, Dana Schutz: Paintings 2002-2005, Kathy Seigel addressed Schutz' work as paintings that "speak so vividly of their making," claiming that Schutz' paintings are an "allegory for the process of making art." Seigel goes on to write "by rendering the process of creation as one of drawing on oneself, recycling oneself and making oneself, Schutz creates a model of creation that blurs beginnings and endings, avoiding the dramatic genesis of the modernist blank canvas, as well as the nihilistic cul-de-sac of the appropriated media image." Examples of the content that Seigel speaks of can be seen in Schutz' paintings Twin Parts, Holding Hands With the Computer, and Chicken and Egg.
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