Dana Schutz & Ryan Johnson
July 7 – October 1, 2022
The Nemeth Art Center is thrilled to present a two-person show featuring work from Dana Schutz and Ryan Johnson. A continuation of our “Couples Counseling” curatorial series that pairs the work of artist-couples, the Nemeth is excited to be the first institution to present their work together.
Dana Schutz, Artist Bio
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, Beat Out The Sun, 2018, Etching with aquatint, 43.25 x 30.625 inches
Ryan Johnson, Artist Bio
Johnson’s figurative sculptures depict dreamlike subjects that evoke both stillness and the potential for action. Across a variety of mediums, Johnson has remained preoccupied with the paradoxes of sculpture - how static forms can suggest movement, lightness, or flight.
A dog chasing its tail, a frog poised on a man’s head, a wounded bird: in Johnson’s work, humans are social animals, and animals are creatures of fascination and insight. Johnson’s recurrent themes are family, mortality, frailty and strength, with time as the unifying metaphor, and the primary material of sculpture.
Symbolic forms and subjects are just as readily understood as literal - a frog is a frog, a dog is a dog – with the implication that metaphor is there if we want it, but there is wonder in the thing itself, without language or elaborate context.
Ryan Johnson (b. 1978, Karachi, Pakistan) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Recent exhibitions include shows at Nina Johnson Gallery, Miami, FL; Sikkema Jenkins and Co., New York, NY; The Suzanne Geiss Company, New York, NY; and Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, NY.
Ryan Johnson, Dog Chasing Tail (detail), 2021, Bronze, 33 x 52 x 52 inches