Dana Schutz

Demo

The comprehensive solo exhibition by Dana Schutz (*1976, lives and works in Brooklyn) at the kestnergesellschaft is the first institutional presentation of this influential painter in Germany. Schutz pursues a new kind of expressionist painting that is intensely colorful and emotional, but presents itself neither as subjective nor as purely figurative. Her pictures focus on impossible scenarios and grotesque depictions of bodies that exhibit a captivatingly sober approach to painting.

At the kestnergesellschaft, Schutz will show her latest God paintings as well as drawings that were created especially for the exhibition. In addition, well-known compositions such as Getting Dressed All at Once (2012) and Shaving (2010) will also be shown, which exaggerate everyday situations into the absurd—sometimes with a curious severity. Chronological actions are packed into a dense simultaneous structure, and private situations are put on public display. The voyeuristic gaze of the viewer is appealed to and at the same time exposed as such. Schutz plays with the long tradition of the female nude, whose reinterpretation she places at center of the work through abstraction, thus inevitably offering up a contemporary version of this subject.

Her latest series of paintings explores God as a motif. Schutz is not interested in religious worship, but in examining a central, representative problem: What would a god look like without religion? As a child, Schutz imagined God as a pop-cultural figure composed from various mass-media sources—a mix of Liberace, the restaurant mascot Bob’s Big Boy, and the moon character from a McDonald’s commercial in the 1980s. These most recent God paintings are no less absurd. They show figures that consist of inanimate, animal and human parts and are as frightening as they are fascinating.

A catalogue will accompany the exhibition with essays by Suzanne Hudson, Chrissie Iles and Susanne Figner. Suzanne Hudson is a professor of art history at the University of Southern California and is known for her influential publications on painting in the 20th and 21st centuries. Chrissie Iles is a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Dana Schutz has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Hepworth Wakefield in England (2013), the Denver Art Museum (2012), the Neuberger Museum of Art (2012) and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto in Italy (2011). Among other prizes, she has received the renowned Columbia University Medal for Excellence as well as the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. Schutz is represented in important international collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Curated by Susanne Figner And Lotte Dinse.