BOOK: Dana Schutz-Phaidon Publications

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. Schutz “ivifies 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. 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. The first comprehensive monograph on Dana Schutz published by Phaidon. Her deeply subjective approach, untethered from realism, translates into images that seem to exist in a place that transcends time while celebrating the intrinsic qualities of her medium of choice with freedom and intelligence. As the artist herself stated, ‘I’m interested in painting as an affective place where the hierarchies of the world can be rearranged within the space of a painting.’ This first comprehensive monograph on her work was created in close collaboration with the artist and features a number of never-before-seen paintings and drawings.-Efi Michalarou