Dana Schutz is an American artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally.
Background
Dana Schutz was born in 1976 in Livonia, Michigan, United States. Dean, her father, taught social studies and doubled as a guidance counselor at Dana’s high school, in Livonia; her mother, Georgia, was a middle-school art teacher in nearby Plymouth. Georgia had studied art at Michigan State. She painted expressionistic landscapes, and there were always plenty of art materials in the house to play with. Schutz, an only child, was naturally curious, independent, fearless, and popular with other kids. When Schutz was fifteen, she decided she was going to be an artist. Her mother let her have the entire basement and showed her how to stretch a canvas, and Dana took it from there.
Education
Dana Schutz studied at Norwich School of Art and Design and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1999. Then she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Cleveland Institute of Art in 2000. Finally, she earned Master of Fine Arts at Columbia University in 2002.
Dana Schutz’s art consists of scenes from a post-apocalyptic world where the white population has mutated into grotesque survivors. Despite their shortcomings, their eyes, posture, and actions reveal a sort of melancholy empathy. These “auto-cannibals” are a despicable race who have to eat their own flesh in order to survive. They are portrayed cultivating and tending their plants, performing surgery on each other and sometimes eating, an act that is always performed outside a social context. Existentially, these auto-cannibals are a mournful species, especially from a romantic or modernist view. But from an ecological and economic or political perspective, with regard to attaining a sustainable society, they may be justifiable. She first came to attention with her debut exhibition Frank from Observation in 2002 based on the conceit of Schutz as the last painter, representing the last subject “Frank.”
Dana Schutz does not flinch from the very hardest issue of our time: mankind’s potential to survive its own ruthless exploitation and avoid extinction. An earlier series of paintings "Face Eater" features a man Frank from observation. In the landscapes where he roams – the last man on earth – there is also a woman. She is invisible, but without her, the pictures of Frank could never be shown. She is an artist and has created both Frank and the world he lives in. The last two people on earth have gender roles that are entirely different from those of the first humans. In their godforsaken world, she alone is the active one. Frank doesn’t look that smart, but he seems kind. He complies with her instructions and undresses to pose on the beach or floats around like a climatically raped polar bear on an ice floe at sea, without questioning his behavior. His role is passive and most of all resembles a hippie-like relic from the 60s.
Dana Schutz’s method is also expressed in the series "How we would…" where she has set herself tasks relating to questions starting with “What if…” or “What would it be like if…” She has also taken a closer look at narcissistic websites where individuals present their special interests, resulting in the series "I’m into…" This is a common introductory phrase when people describe their proclivities or a specialist field. Dana Schutz has explored these websites but takes the subject one step further by making up new, non-existent interests. She challenges herself by painting what she believed could not be painted, and out of these paintings, a cluster of remarkable presentations of hobbies flourish, reflecting a new kind of evolving human being, or a parallel, completely different, existence.
Dana Schutz’s paintings are a cascade of color, rhythm, decorative features, and abstract elements, incorporating a mixture of all the skills and gestures of painting that have been passed down through the ages. She allows several modernist masters and their experiences to blend with her own. In one painting, a woman is leaning the same way as one of the ladies in a late cubist work by Pablo Picasso. The leaves and branches surrounding her figures are sometimes drawn with the same plain beauty as if by Henri Matisse. And the presence of material things is as distinct as in the pop art master Claes Oldenburg’s bright objects. An onlooker with a knowledge of art history will spot umpteen references to the new and old in painting and sculpture.
Dana Schutz’ paintings can be seen in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Contemporary Arts, Los Angeles; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas; Tel Aviv Museum; Israel, among many others. She is represented by Petzel, New York and Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin. Dana currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Quotations:
“I’m never interested in the painting being a mirror to culture. I think that's really boring. What I’m interested in is painting as an affective space. The place where the hierarchies of the world can be rearranged within the space of a painting.”
Personality
Physical Characteristics:
Schutz has a high, slightly childish voice.
Interests
Artists
The contemporary artists she admired most were Cecily Brown, Laura Owens, John Currin, and Nicole Eisenman — painterly painters, who were in short supply at the time. She also looked closely at Julian Schnabel, David Salle, and other American painters who emerged in the nineteen-eighties; at the contemporary German artists Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen; and at a galaxy of earlier masters, from Pontormo, Goya, Manet, and Picasso to Diego Rivera, whose twenty-seven-part mural in the Detroit Institute of Arts, with its vivid evocations of Ford’s River Rouge factory and its mighty workers, had enthralled her as a child.
Connections
Dana is married to the artist Ryan Johnson, with whom she has a son Arlo. She and Johnson met in graduate school at Columbia. When he applied for the program, Schutz, who was finishing her first year, was one of three student interviewers on the faculty admitting panel, and, because he sighed audibly before answering questions, she decided that he must be depressed. The applicants and their interviewers all went to a bar afterward, and she and Johnson ended up talking mostly to each other. They started living together soon afterward. In 2005, they moved to Gowanus with several artist friends, and Schutz and Johnson were married the following year.
