Dana Schutz: Paintings 2002-2006
Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland
September 29 - December 30, 2006
The Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (MOCA) presents the work of 30-year-old painter Dana Schutz, whose “ecstatically imaginative paintings” have rapidly established her as one of the art stars of the contemporary art world.
Dana Schutz: Paintings 2002-2006, the first comprehensive solo museum exhibition of the artist’s work, features eighteen paintings created over the last four years, including three new works shown for the first time which were created specifically for MOCA Cleveland’s presentation of the exhibition.
The works, with their thick, lush surfaces and expressive palette of gaudy yellows, reds, deep greens and purples, explore social, emotional and political themes. The exhibition was curated by Raphaela Platow and organized by The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts. MOCA’s presentation of the exhibition and related programming was coordinated by Senior Curator Margo Crutchfield.
Dana Schutz describes her work as “pictures that float in and out of pictorial genres. Still-lifes become personified, portraits become events and landscapes become constructions. I embrace the area between which the subject is composed and decomposing, formed and formless, inanimate and alive.” Dana Schutz: Paintings 2002-2006 demonstrates this approach to painting through significant examples of Schutz’s different bodies of work, including selections from the series, “Frank From Observation” and “Self-Eaters.”
Says Rose Curator Raphaela Platow, “In many of her dynamic works, Schutz attempts to paint things that one almost cannot imagine.” With the Frank From Observation series, Schutz creates a world in which Frank is the last man on earth, a “castaway” who is seen alternately engaged in activity or reposed and contemplative. In the Self-Eaters series, Dana Schutz paints figures who are calmly depicted in the acts of devouring, dismembering and recreating themselves. Other paintings in Dana Schutz: Paintings 2002-2006, such as Party (2004), which portrays the Bush Administration Cabinet wandering through a jungle, are more politically-charged and overtly satirical.
About Schutz, whose influences include the German Expressionists, Henri Matisse and the Fauves, Paul Gauguin and the Symbolists, and Philip Guston, among others, Raphaela Platow has said she “creates her figurative paintings in thick, glutting strokes, similar to sculpting the image from paint. Many of her works depict hypothetical scenarios that are based on reality, but extended into the imaginary based on the parameters the artist sets for her narratives.”
Born in Livonia, Michigan in 1976, Dana Schutz currently lives and works in New York. She earned a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art (2000) and an MFA from the Columbia University School of Fine Arts in New York (2002). Her paintings have been featured in one-person shows in New York, Boston, Paris, Berlin, and Santa Fe, and in many group exhibitions, such as the Prague and Venice Biennials. Dana Schutz’s work is in numerous private and public collections including The Progressive Collection in Cleveland, OH; the Saatchi Collection in London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, all in New York.
MOCA - MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART CLEVELAND
11400 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44106
