Dana Schutz
Dana Schutz
b. 1976
The American artist Dana Schutz (b. 1976) creates compelling, boldly coloured figurative paintings that combine imaginary narratives and real-life emotional states. Challenging the boundaries of pictorial genres, Schutz’s images subvert conventional expectations by fluctuating seamlessly between still life, portrait and landscape.
The American artist Dana Schutz creates compelling, boldly coloured figurative paintings that combine imaginary narratives and real-life emotional states. Challenging the boundaries of pictorial genres, Schutz’s images subvert conventional expectations by fluctuating seamlessly between still life, portrait and landscape.
Schutz was born in Livonia, Michigan, in 1976. While working on her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Cleveland Institute of Art, she moved to England to attend the Norwich School of Art and Design. She completed her degree the next year, and in 2022 she received a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University in New York City.
The artist immediately set out to shock the art world with her breakthrough series ‘Frank from Observation’ (2002), a group of jarring, absurdist canvases portraying the fictional character Frank, conceived as the last man on Earth. Inspired by a variety of sources including popular culture, history, science and fiction, these impressive paintings incorporate bright colours and a gestural brushwork. The result is a series of unsettling images, whose dark scenarios are offset by their whimsical, almost carnivalesque atmosphere.
Other early works include the ‘Self Eaters’ (2003-04) series, depicting creatures in the act of eating themselves, satirical portraits of celebrities such as ‘The Autopsy of Michael Jackson’ (2005), and politically engaged paintings addressing the hypocrisy of the Bush administration and American capitalism.
In her complex, hallucinatory paintings, Schutz investigates the ambiguities of her figures’ psychological states by interrogating the emotions of their viewers. Through her grotesque characters, who inhabit imaginary landscapes, she conveys a sense of emotional turmoil that reflects the realities of living in today’s world. She has stated:
Subsequent paintings, such as those Schutz’s presented at her 2012 New York exhibition ‘Piano in the Rain’, rework her fictional scenarios in a more intimate key by focusing on human figures and everyday situations. In 2016, the artist returned to sensitive political themes with ‘Open Casket’, a painting depicting the corpse of Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old boy who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955. The painting was first exhibited in ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ (2016) at Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, and was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, to the outrage of some critics.
Alongside her canvases, Schutz’s practice has expanded to involve drawing and printmaking which variously revisit previous paintings or boldly explore the potentials of colour and line.
Schutz has exhibited internationally, with locations including New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Miami, Geneva and Los Angeles. Her works can be found in the permanent collections of art institutions such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Saatchi gallery, the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Today, she lives and works in in Brooklyn, New York, where she continues to produce art that generates uncanny, dreamlike narratives.
