American, b. 1976
One of the most prominent painters of her generation, the New York–based Dana Schutz is known for her distinctive visual style characterized by vibrant color and tactile brushwork. Her large-scale paintings capture imaginary stories, hypothetical situations, and impossible physical feats, such as swimming while smoking and crying. Schutz’s paintings combine abstraction and figuration with expressive imagination, fragmented bodies, banal objects, and quotidian scenes to create oddly compelling and intriguing pictures.
Over the last decade, she has honed her approach to painting, creating tightly structured scenarios and compressed interiors. Her works capture subjects who seem to be actively managing, even fighting, the limitations of their depicted environments—boundaries set by the canvases’ actual borders. Many of her paintings depict distorted bodies, revealing a nuanced exploration of the female body engaged in life’s everyday rituals.
Drawing on the legacies of both figurative and abstract painting, with nods to touchstone figures such as George Grosz and Max Beckmann, Schutz’s unique voice in painting exemplifies the expansive possibilities of the medium today. In her work, the artist explores what can occur within parameters of space and time and how finite zones can unfold into curious and evocative narratives. At the 2017 Whitney Biennial, the artist’s painting Open Casket (2016), depicting the body of Emmett Till, stirred considerable backlash and controversy upon its unveiling.
Schutz was born in 1976 in Livonia, Michigan, and received her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art, Ohio and her MFA from Columbia University, New York. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Columbia University Medal for Excellence, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, and a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant. Schutz lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Over the last decade, she has honed her approach to painting, creating tightly structured scenarios and compressed interiors. Her works capture subjects who seem to be actively managing, even fighting, the limitations of their depicted environments—boundaries set by the canvases’ actual borders. Many of her paintings depict distorted bodies, revealing a nuanced exploration of the female body engaged in life’s everyday rituals.
Drawing on the legacies of both figurative and abstract painting, with nods to touchstone figures such as George Grosz and Max Beckmann, Schutz’s unique voice in painting exemplifies the expansive possibilities of the medium today. In her work, the artist explores what can occur within parameters of space and time and how finite zones can unfold into curious and evocative narratives. At the 2017 Whitney Biennial, the artist’s painting Open Casket (2016), depicting the body of Emmett Till, stirred considerable backlash and controversy upon its unveiling.
Schutz was born in 1976 in Livonia, Michigan, and received her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art, Ohio and her MFA from Columbia University, New York. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Columbia University Medal for Excellence, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, and a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant. Schutz lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
