Rose Iron Works and Art Deco @ CMA - Cleveland Museum of Art - A Journey from Art Nouveau to Art Deco

Rose Iron Works and Art Deco 

Cleveland Museum of Art

July 6 - October 19, 2025

Muse with Violin Screen, 1930 

Rose Iron Works (America, Ohio, Cleveland, est. 1904) 

Designed by Paul Fehér (American, b. Hungary, 1898–1990)

Steel, brass, silver and gold plating, cotton velveteen, 

156.2 x 156.2 cm. 

The Cleveland Museum of Art, 

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund, 2020.216. 

© Rose Iron Works Collections  

Martin Rose (American, 1870–1955)

Rose, c. 1904

Wrought iron; 35.6 x 14 x 40.6 cm.  

© Rose Iron Works Collections 

Rose Iron Works, the family-owned, Cleveland source for premiere quality decorative metalwork, is the subject of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s (CMA) newest exhibition, Rose Iron Works and Art Deco. An important part of Cleveland’s artistic heritage, Rose Iron Works has been operating continuously since its founding in 1904, creating a legacy of industry, craftwork, and artistic production. Rose Iron Works and Art Deco traces the company’s journey from Art Nouveau to Art Deco during its first 30 years.

In the early 1900s, Cleveland was one of the wealthiest cities in the United States and a center for metalworking, which made it an appealing place for Hungarian ornamental blacksmith Martin Rose, founder of Rose Iron Works, to start a business. It soon became one of the leading manufacturers of decorative metalwork in the United States, with decorative metalwork adorning some of the city’s most notable buildings.  

Trained in Budapest and Vienna in a tradition that drew inspiration from recreating historical styles, Rose was interested in artistic and technological innovations. Around 1900, he adopted the Art Nouveau aesthetic, which used sinuous lines and organic forms inspired by nature, and in the late 1920s, a “modern” style. 

In 1925, a groundbreaking international exhibition in Paris presented modern decorative arts—a style that later became known as Art Deco. Rose’s compatriot and a designer active in Paris, Paul Fehér, joined Rose Iron Works in Cleveland a few years later. Their artistic collaboration resulted in some of the best Art Deco ironwork in the country, including the celebrated Muse with Violin Screen (1930), now in the CMA’s collection.  

“Rose Iron Works is important locally, nationally and internationally,” said Ada de Wit, Ellen S. and Bruce V. Mavec Curator of Decorative Arts at the CMA. “This exhibition places Rose Iron Works in context with an elite network of blacksmiths and designers in Europe between the cities of Budapest, Hungary; Vienna, Austria; and Paris, France. It is apparent that Martin Rose had his finger on the pulse of European trends in the decorative arts and was able to translate them for a Cleveland audience.” 

In the Art Deco period, decorative metalwork connoted luxury through high-quality craftsmanship; modern, sophisticated design; and the use of expensive materials such as brass, chrome, and in some cases, silver and gold plating, as well as novel alloys like monel. Ornaments played an important role in architecture and were used on everything from public buildings and places of worship to banks and private homes, many of which can still be seen, for example, in Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights mansions.  

The exhibition showcases some of Rose Iron Works’ most notable Art Deco creations, including the now iconic Muse with Violin screen (1930), and loans from Rose Iron Works, such as an ambitious 90-foot frieze of the history of metalworking and a door grille salvaged from Halle Brothers Co. (1927), a high-end department store chain in Cleveland. Another significant loan is an overdoor (c. 1885) from the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest, made by Gyula Jungfer (Hungarian, 1841–1908), Rose’s teacher in Budapest and the most successful artist-blacksmith in Hungary. It represents the European tradition and training that shaped Rose’s career.  

CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART

11150 East Boulevard, Cleveland, Ohio 44106

www.clevelandart.org

Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism @ Cleveland Museum of Art

Degas and the Laundress: 

Women, Work, and Impressionism 

Cleveland Museum of Art

October 8, 2023 –January 14, 2024

Edgar Degas (French, 1834–1917)

Woman Ironing, begun c. 1876, completed c. 1887. 

Oil on canvas; 99 x 82.5 cm. 

National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 

Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1972.74.1

The Cleveland Museum of Art presents Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism, on view in the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Gallery. The first exhibition to explore Impressionist artist Edgar Degas’s representations of Parisian laundresses, the groundbreaking show includes the largest selection of these works seen together to date, only in Cleveland. The artworks from this series—revolutionary in their emphasis on women’s work, the strenuousness of such labor, and social class—were featured in Edgar Degas’s most significant exhibitions, where they were praised by critics as epitomizing modernity. The nearly 100 works exhibited from over 30 European and American collections reveal that depictions of laundresses by the artist and his contemporaries featured some of the most striking formal innovations of the time.  

“Degas carried out some of the most striking experimentation of his long career throughout his laundress series,” said Britany Salsbury, curator of prints and drawings. “The subject fascinated him beginning as a young man in the 1850s and continuing until his final decade of work as an artist. The images that he created of these women are fascinating for their emphasis on labor itself rather than the stereotypes that persisted about them throughout popular culture. The women who undertook work ironing and washing often did so because they lacked other options, and they endured tremendously difficult working conditions.”

A visible presence in the city, ironing in shops open to the street or carrying heavy baskets of clothing, laundresses undertook some of the most difficult and poorly paid labor at the time, leading some in the industry to supplement their income through sex work. The depictions of these women featured in Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism provide a surprising contrast to more familiar Impressionist representations of upper-middle-class leisure.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919)

The Laundre [La Blanchisseuse]ss, 1877–79. 

Oil on canvas; 80.8 x 56.6 cm. 

Art Institute of Chicago, 

Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection, 1947.102

Edouard Vuillard (French, 1868–1940)

Woman Ironing, 1892

Oil on board; 21.4 x 25.4 cm. 

The Cleveland Museum of Art, 

Nancy F. and Joseph P. Keithley Collection Gift, 2020.119

Pierre Bonnard (French, 1867–1947)

The Little Laundress, from Album des peintres-graveurs, 1896. 

Color lithograph on China paper; image: 29 x 19.7 cm; sheet: 45.4 x 33.7 cm. 

The Cleveland Museum of Art, 

Nancy F. and Joseph P. Keithley Collection Gift, 2020.151

Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism contextualizes Edgar Degas’s laundress series with paintings, drawings, and prints of the same subject by the artist’s contemporaries—including Gustave Caillebotte, Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard—as well as painters that Edgar Degas influenced and was influenced by, from Honoré Daumier to Pablo Picasso. It also presents ephemera, such as posters, photographs, and books, that reveals the widespread interest that Parisians of all social classes had in the topic of laundresses during the late 1800s.

“The extraordinary works assembled for this exhibition reveal a new and exciting aspect of an otherwise well-known art historical movement,” said William Griswold, director and president of the Cleveland Museum of Art. “The Cleveland Museum of Art’s exceptional holdings of 19th-century French art situate us to present such an inventive exhibition, and we look forward to sharing works of impressive quality—from Degas’s private sketchbooks to some of his most celebrated canvases alongside those by his colleagues—that have never before been seen together.”

Degas and the Laundress

Women, Work, and Impressionism

Exhibition Catalogue

Britany Salsbury ed.

Published by The Cleveland Museum of Art

ISBN: 978-0-300-27322-9

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated publication featuring thematic essays by scholars of art history, French studies, literature, and history. The 256-page catalogue is the first publication to examine and document Edgar Degas’s portrayals of Parisian laundresses. Edited by Britany Salsbury with contributions by Aleksandra Bursac, Michelle Foa, Gretchen Schultz, Charles Sowerwine, Richard Thomson, and Claire White.

CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART

11150 East Boulevard, Cleveland, Ohio 44106

www.clevelandart.org

Georgia O’Keeffe @ The Cleveland Museum of Art

Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern
The Cleveland Museum of Art
Through March 3, 2019

Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern offers a unique look into the fascinating connections among the paintings, personal style, and public persona of one of America’s most celebrated artists. Throughout her 65-year career, Georgia O’Keeffe defied convention and forged a fiercely independent identity that was integral to her art. Showcasing approximately 140 objects, including paintings, drawings, and sculptures alongside her garments (many shown for the first time) and photographic portraits of her, the exhibition reveals Georgia O’Keeffe’s determination to be strikingly modern in both her art and her life. Organized by the Brooklyn Museum, Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern is on view in the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Exhibition Gallery. 

“Georgia O’Keeffe is a beloved icon of 20th-century American art,” said William Griswold, director of the Cleveland Museum of Art. “The exhibition offers an intriguing look at how O’Keeffe shaped the world’s perception of her identity, artistic values, and style.”

Rejecting the restrained Victorian world into which she was born, Georgia O’Keeffe absorbed the progressive principles of the Arts and Crafts movement, which promoted the idea that everything a person made or lived with should reflect a unified, visually pleasing aesthetic. 

“Throughout the exhibition, we discover an artist who drew no boundaries between the art she made and the life she lived,” said Mark Cole, curator of American painting and sculpture. “Elegant simplicity is a hallmark of O’Keeffe’s streamlined style, manifesting itself through every object in Living Modern.” 

Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern is organized in sections that chart a chronology of Georgia O’Keeffe’s career. One large section is devoted to her early decades as a young artist in New York, specifically the 1920s and ’30s. At this time O’Keeffe honed a restrained palette of black and white, and a plain, relatively unornamented style that dominated much of her art and wardrobe.

The exhibition’s next section is devoted to Georgia O’Keeffe’s mature career in New Mexico, where her art and clothing changed in response to the surrounding colors of the American Southwest. She began wearing blue jeans, which she proclaimed to be America’s national costume, and coupled them with long-sleeved cotton men’s-styled shirts. At this time, she routinely introduced color into her clothing, mostly blue, occasionally red—the palette of her wardrobe mirroring her New Mexico canvases. 

Another section of the exhibition addresses Georgia O’Keeffe’s appreciation of Asian cultures. She professed an interest in Chinese and Japanese painting as early as the 1920s and amassed an extensive library of books devoted to both. In 1959 she was finally able to travel to Asia, where she augmented what would become a collection of nearly two dozen kimonos, some of which she wore for bed and bath.

The final section explores the significant role photography played in establishing O’Keeffe’s late-career celebrity. Some 50 photographers asked her to pose over her lifetime, solidifying her status as a pioneer of modernism and promoting her as an iconic artist with style. For the camera, O’Keeffe dressed in impeccably tailored black suits by designers such as Balenciaga, embodying a toughness, austerity, and individualism befitting someone who had lived life on her own terms. 

Highlights

Georgia O’Keeffe, c. 1920–22. Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864–1946). Gelatin silver print; 11.4 x 9 cm (4 1/2 x 3 1/2 in.). Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM, Gift of the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, 2003.01.006

In this early photograph, Georgia O’Keeffe wrapped herself in a black cape and accessorized it with a bowler hat. Posing her against the lightness of the sky and photographing her from a low vantage point, Alfred Stieglitz interpreted Georgia O’Keeffe as androgynous and “mannish.” Like other nonconformist women during the 1920s, O’Keeffe loved challenging and confounding society’s conventional dress codes, and Stieglitz enjoyed dramatizing her boldness and O’Keeffe’s cape can be seen in the exhibition. 

Blouse (detail), c. early to mid-1930s. Attributed to Georgia O’Keeffe. White linen. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM, Gift of Juan and Anna Marie Hamilton, 2000.03.0248. 

Photo © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

The decoration at the neckline of this blouse recalls Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings of crinkled autumn leaves and corrugated seashells. The blouse and the ornament are shaped by tiny pin tucks—each done by hand-- that look like the veins of a leaf. 

The Mountain, New Mexico, 1931. Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986). Oil on canvas; 76.4 × 91.8 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase 32.14. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Digital Image © Whitney Museum, New York 

Georgia O’Keeffe’s love of color in nature found its match in the Southwest, and she explored its hues avidly in her paintings and, more modestly, in her wardrobe. Describing her palette in New Mexico, O’Keeffe explained, “All the earth colors of the painter’s palette are out there in the many miles of badlands. The light Naples yellow through the ochres—orange and red and purple earth—even the soft earth greens.” 

Catalogue: Published by the Brooklyn Museum, Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern explores how Georgia O’Keeffe lived her life steeped in modernism, bringing the same style she developed in her art to her dress, her homes, and her lifestyle. Richly illustrated with images of her art and views of the two homes she designed and furnished in New Mexico, the book also includes never before published photographs of O’Keeffe’s clothes. Author and exhibition curator Wanda M. Corn has attributed some of the most exquisite of these garments to O’Keeffe, a skilled seamstress who understood fabric and design, and who has become an icon in today’s fashion world as much for her personal style as for her art.

Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern is organized by the Brooklyn Museum with guest curator Wanda M. Corn, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita in Art History, Stanford University and made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts. 

THE CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART
11150 East Boulevard, Cleveland, Ohio 44106
www.clevelandart.org

Simon Denny @ MOCA Cleveland - The Founder’s Paradox

Simon Denny: The Founder’s Paradox
Museum of Contemporary Art - MOCA Cleveland
February 16 - June 10, 2018

SIMON DENNY is a Berlin-based artist who explores the aesthetics, rhetoric and cultural impact of technology and technologists, both in the public and the private sector.

For his exhibition at MOCA Cleveland, Simon Denny presents new sculptures, paintings, and prints that employ the language of board games to explore and unpack political narratives associated with a side of radical conservatism emerging from influential parts of the technology business community in recent years. Reflecting on the growing subcultural popularity of board games, and resonant with the histories of game theory’s influence on the technology sector, these works present popular board games remapped with narratives distilled from texts like Peter Theil’s contrarian Zero to One and the cult libertarian book The Sovereign Individual. For example, Settlers of Catan, which is the favorite board game of tech entrepreneur and founder of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman is re-imagined as a story of expansion where a player “settles, trades, and builds” their way from a decaying earth to New Zealand, then out into international waters to found a sea-steading nation, and finally to the Moon and Mars to create space colonies.

Simon Denny: The Founder’s Paradox includes remapped sculptural versions of three existing popular board games that include Settlers of Catan, The Game of Life, and Descent: Journey’s Into Darkness. Each sculpture is accompanied by a group of paintings and prints that present the new rules, characters, and graphic identity for the remapped games now retitled Founders, Game of Life: Collective vs. Individual, and Ascent – Above the Nation State.

In the works on display, newly prominent mythologies about the figure of the entrepreneurial “founder” and the role of the nation state in a libertarian future collide with fantasy genre imagery, expansionist ambition, and the role of political ideology. These narratives are present within globally impactful innovations like Bitcoin and emergent platform monopolies enabled by the network effects of big data and Web 2.0.

In an exciting collaborative component, Simon Denny’s exhibition also explores the intersection of technology and management philosophy through an experimental seminar and workshop led by Denny and Youngjin Yoo, a Professor at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western University, which also includes Patrick Barrett, Adjunct Professor at the Cleveland Institute of Art (CIA). Here he works with MBA students and Design students to produce designs for sculptural board games that investigate the impact specific technologies might have on various industrial sectors — such as transportation, healthcare and housing as they meet Augmented Reality, the blockchain and big data —providing a counterpart to his own board game sculptures.

SIMON DENNY

Simon Denny (1982, Auckland, NZ) is a Berlin based artist whose work focuses on the production, dissemination, and consumption of contemporary media and technology with a particular focus on the internet based exchange of capital and information. His works take shape in a range of forms that often mimic the visual language and devices that appear at various technology industry trade shows and launch events. Denny is a research based artist whose work offers critical and celebratory insights into the content and structure of the technology industry, governmental information agencies, and individual cult figures in the field. Recent projects include exhibitions, objects, and installations that investigate the emergent cryptocurrency Bitcoin and the blockchain technology that makes it possible; the Berlin based SoundCloud startup; and a series of graphics—including cartoons, maps, and charts— made by a senior designer at the National Security Agency (NSA), which were part of the information leaked by Edward Snowden. Denny has been based in Berlin since 2009 following his studies at the Städelschule, Frankfurt. Recent solo exhibitions of his work include Business Insider, WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2016); Products for Organizing, Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London (2015); The Innovator’s Dilemma, MoMA PS1, New York (2015); New Management, Portikus, Frankfurt (2014); All You Need Is Data, Kunstverein Munich, Munich (2013); and Full Participation, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2012). In 2015 he represented New Zealand in the 56th Venice Biennale.

Museum of Contemporary Art - MOCA Cleveland
Toby Devan Lewis Gallery
11400 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44106
http://mocacleveland.org

Tauba Auerbach and Eliane Radigue @ MOCA Cleveland

INDUCTION: Tauba Auerbach and Eliane Radigue
Museum of Contemporary Art - MOCA Cleveland
February 16 - June 10, 2018

Tauba Auerbach's rich exploration of painting, sculpture, sound, and typography considers the possibilities of multi-dimensional space and phenomenological encounters. Her work often engages with systems of logic — mathematical, linguistic, and spatial — proposing ways to enhance their fluidity, or subvert them entirely. Most recently, her large-scale paintings and glass- and 3D-printed sculptures articulate the relationship between such natural forms as the wave, the vortex, and the helix with planes of sight and human gesture. Alongside innovators such as John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, and La Monte Young, Paris-based composer Éliane Radigue is one of the leading figures in experimental music and sound art. From the 1960’s until 2000, Radigue worked primarily using a single synthesizer, the ARP 2500 modular system and tape. Since 2001 Radigue has composed primarily for acoustic instruments, creating works that are uniquely influenced by her study of Tibetan Buddhism.

The exhibition represents Tauba Auerbach’s first collaborative installation in a museum with an experimental composer. Similarly, the exhibition marks an important point for Éliane Radigue. At 85, Éliane Radigue is highly esteemed within the field of electro-acoustic composition, yet she has rarely been acknowledged for her sound installations.

INDUCTION brings together the work of Éliane Radigue and Tauba Auerbach in an architecturally responsive installation that explores the artists’ shared interests, including Eastern philosophies, the body and states of consciousness, and the concept of phenomenology. The exhibition will include a gallery-sized installation of one of Radique’s earliest compositions, OMNHT (1970). Premiered at Galerie Rive Droit in 1970, and presented at MOCA Cleveland for the first time in the United States, the work is composed of three simultaneous multi-durational loops of modified recordings of a flowing river. The work is installed inside the walls of the gallery space so that its low volume creates a vibration that can be felt as visitors lean against the wall, creating a sonic connection between the body and visual landscape that Auerbach has created for the exhibition.

Tauba Auerbach’s contribution features new paintings from her Grain series, installed for the first time as freestanding, two-sided objects. Presented in tandem with these paintings is a suite of new video works, projected on hanging screens and marking the artist’s first time working in this medium. Additionally, the exhibition will include a series of new flame-worked interlocking glass sculptures crafted by the artist herself. Auerbach’s new works emerge from an inquiry-based process and self-experimentation, focusing on the body’s relationship to induced states of consciousness, such as hypnotic induction and trance states, and growing to other systems that make use of frequency and flow including Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Tension, Stress and Trauma Release (TRE), acupuncture and Frequency-Specific Microcurrent. These healing modalities reveal particular shapes and rhythms, and are here elaborated in the gestures of Auerbach’s new videos, sculptures and painting.

As part of the exhibition, MOCA Cleveland will present a concert of Eliane Radigue’s acoustic compositions in the gallery space, performed by world-renowned musicians Carol Robinson (Paris) and Nathan Wooley (New York), who are longstanding collaborators of Radigue. The band that Tauba Auerbach collaborates with, Zs, will also perform a series of new works in the gallery as a closing program.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue that will premier newly commissioned texts on Tauba Auerbach’s work and new translations on Radigue’s work in English. It will be launched in the spring of 2018.

TAUBA AUERBACH

Tauba Auerbach (1981, San Francisco, CA) lives and works in New York. Working in a variety of media, ranging from painting and photography to book design and musical performance, Auerbach explores the limits of our structures and systems of logic (linguistic, mathematical, spatial) and the points at which they break down and open up onto new visual and poetic possibilities. A major solo exhibition of Auerbach’s work was organized by Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2011), and traveled to Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (2012), and Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2013). Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012 and 2013); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2013); Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (2014); Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (2015–16); and the Kitchen, New York (2016). Auerbach has also participated in the New Museum Triennial (2009) and the Whitney Biennial (2010). She was the recipient of the Eureka Fellowship, The Fleischhacker Foundation (2008); SECA Art Award, SFMOMA (2008); and Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2011).

ELIANE RADIGUE

Éliane Radigue (1932, Paris) is a French electronic music composer. She studied under Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, who oversaw her early exploration in microphone feedback and long tape loops. Over the course of her career, she has developed a unique sound influenced by Tibetan Buddhism. Her masterpiece, Trilogie de la Mort (1998), follows the path of six states of consciousness as interpreted by the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Bardo Thodol. After 2000, Radigue began working in acoustic sounds, as demonstrated in her Occam cycle. She has collaborated with the improvisation group La Petites on the album Before the Libretto (2005). Performances of her music have taken place at galleries and museums such as the Salon des Artistes Decorateurs (Paris); Foundation Maeght (St. Paul de Vence); Issue Project Room (New York); Gallery Sonnabend (New York); Galerie Yvon Lambert (Paris), at festivals including the Festival de Como (Italy), the Festival d'Automne a Paris, Festival Estival (Paris), International Festival of Music (Bourges, France); and at the New York Cultural Center, Experimental Intermedia Foundation (New York), The Kitchen (New York), Columbia University (New York), Vanguard Theatre (Los Angeles), LACE (Los Angeles), Mills College (Oakland), the San Francisco Art Institute, and the NEMO Festival (Chicago 1996).

Museum of Contemporary Art - MOCA Cleveland
Mueller Family Gallery
11400 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44106
http://mocacleveland.org

Dana Schutz, MOCA Cleveland, Exhibition Dana Schutz: Paintings 2002-2006

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

www.mocacleveland.org

Andrea Loefke, The Sculpture Center, Cleveland

Andrea Loefke
The Sculpture Center, Cleveland
January 10 – February 7, 2003

once upon a time there was a world: whimsical, humorous, synthetic, girly, intimate, alien, glittering, sexy, soft, innocent, explicit, humming and obscure..........

I weave fictional narratives, dream worlds with anchors to the real, occupying a space between familiarity and fantasy. The environments are systems – overlapping worlds, groups and subgroups that are contrasted and united through scale, color palette, sound, form, space, and making technique. The continuous change of the vocabulary, the pushing and pulling between these things, creates hierarchies, different events that both compete and communicate. The groupings and their spacing become a journey of discovery. I lay down paths, combine the micro and the macro, introduce different narratives into the work, evoke notions of communication, irritation and movement between elements, infuse life into objects, and ask the viewer to relate oneself to.

– Andrea Loefke 

THE SCULPTURE CENTER
1834 East 123rd Street, Cleveland, Ohio 44106-1910
www.sculpturecenter.org