Dana Schutz, Artist Bio

July 7 – October 1, 2022

Dana Schutz is known for formally inventive canvases that combine figuration and abstraction to construct complex visual narratives that engage the capacity of painting to represent subjective experience. Often depicting figures in seemingly impossible, enigmatic, or invented situations, her expressive canvases convey emotions and psychological states of mind that reveal the complications, tensions, and ambiguities of contemporary life.

As Peter Schjeldahl notes, Schutz “vivifies present conditions of life on a faltering planet as dramatically as an artist can while staying devoted to aesthetic ideals.” She achieves this through her singular approach to the medium of painting. Schjeldahl continues, “Painting wet-in-wet with oils, building thick and eventful surfaces, she creates allegories of uncertain but torrid, gnashing implication, a bit like the enigmatic narratives of the German modern master Max Beckmann, but less solemn. She does this with almost preposterously extraordinary gifts for composition, paint handling, and, in particular, color, suffusing clashes of hue and tone with ghostly essences of a chromatic unity that you feel rather than quite see.”

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 lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Dana Schutz’s vivid, gestural paintings combine figuration and abstraction and often depict subjects in a fluctuating state of invented and realistic scenarios that plumb the emotional complexities of contemporary life. The Nemeth will be premiering a new large-scale oil painting and a series of etchings from the renowned artist – whose work can be found in the collections of the Hammer Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and upcoming shows at Contemporary Fine Arts (Berlin) and David Zwirner (NYC).