ART CITIES:Munich-Dana Schutz

Dana Schutz’s work blends vivid colors, distorted figures, and emotional intensity to explore themes such as identity, memory, and human experience. Schutz often combines humor with psychological depth, creating scenes that feel both surreal and familiar. Often depicting figures in seemingly impossible, enigmatic, or invented situations, her works reveal the deeper complications, tensions, and ambiguities of contemporary life.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Pinakothek der Moderne Archive

For more than twenty years, Dana Schutz has occupied a singular place in contemporary figurative painting. Renowned for her psychologically charged compositions and explosive use of color, Schutz has developed a visual language that is at once theatrical, unsettling, humorous, and profoundly human. Her paintings are populated by distorted bodies, improbable situations, and emotionally heightened narratives that blur the boundaries between reality and fantasy. Rather than offering literal depictions of the world, they construct allegorical spaces in which the absurdities, anxieties, and contradictions of contemporary life unfold.

Schutz’s work resists straightforward interpretation. At first glance, her paintings appear to inhabit fantastical worlds disconnected from everyday experience. Yet this apparent distance is deceptive. Behind the exaggerated figures and vibrant chromatic storms lie reflections on vulnerability, conflict, grief, resilience, and the fragile absurdity of the human condition. Small accidents, personal failures, and collective tragedies are transformed into modern myths, inviting viewers to question both the narratives before them and the realities they themselves inhabit. It is this ability to combine wit with psychological intensity that has established Schutz as one of the defining painters of her generation.

Although painting remains central to her practice, drawing and printmaking have always played an equally significant role in the evolution of her ideas. Rather than functioning as preparatory exercises alone, her prints and drawings become independent arenas for experimentation. Working across etching, aquatint, monotype, charcoal, watercolor, and mixed media, Schutz repeatedly revisits the same motifs, allowing each medium to reshape both the formal composition and the conceptual meaning of an image. The process reveals an artist less interested in producing definitive statements than in continuously testing the possibilities of visual storytelling.

This sustained dialogue between media takes center stage in “Trouble and Appearance”, her first exhibition in Munich, presented at the Pinakothek der Moderne. Rather than emphasizing her celebrated paintings, the exhibition focuses on an aspect of her practice that has remained comparatively unknown: drawing. Bringing together sketches, studies, preparatory works, monotypes, prints, and monumental charcoal compositions, the exhibition offers an unprecedented view into the artist’s creative process and demonstrates how drawing functions not merely as preparation but as an autonomous artistic language.

At the heart of the exhibition is an entirely new body of monumental charcoal drawings, some stretching up to six meters in length. Their scale inevitably recalls the immersive murals of the American avant-garde, particularly the monumental ambitions of the New York School Abstract Expressionists. Yet unlike the gestural abstraction of that generation, Schutz fills these expansive surfaces with recognizable figures, fractured narratives, and emotional tensions that oscillate between representation and abstraction. Executed exclusively in charcoal, the works demonstrate extraordinary technical confidence while revealing an immediacy and physicality distinct from her paintings. These mural-scale drawings make their public debut in Munich.

Equally revealing are the exhibition’s numerous sketches and preparatory studies, many of which have never before been publicly exhibited. These intimate works allow viewers to witness the gradual evolution of Schutz’s ideas—from spontaneous gestures and fragmented figures to the carefully orchestrated complexity of her finished paintings. They reveal that the apparent spontaneity of her compositions is underpinned by sustained experimentation, revision, and compositional refinement.

The exhibition also highlights Schutz’s remarkable achievements in printmaking, particularly through her recent large-scale monotypes. These works investigate the dynamics of human relationships with an exceptional freedom of gesture. In places, recognizable forms dissolve into sweeping abstractions of pigment, suggesting that emotion itself may exceed the limits of representation. Rather than illustrating specific narratives, the monotypes evoke psychological states in flux, balancing intimacy with ambiguity.

“Trouble and Appearance” proposes drawing as a vital force within twenty-first-century artistic practice. By placing works on paper in direct dialogue with paintings and prints, the exhibition challenges conventional hierarchies that have traditionally privileged painting over drawing. Instead, it presents drawing as a site of invention, experimentation, and intellectual inquiry—a medium capable of sustaining the same conceptual and emotional complexity as painting itself.

In an era saturated with digital imagery, Dana Schutz reminds us of the enduring expressive power of the hand-drawn mark. Whether working with luminous paint, delicate monotypes, or monumental charcoal, she continues to transform the contradictions of contemporary existence into compelling visual narratives. “Trouble and Appearance” is therefore more than a survey of works on paper; it is a rare opportunity to encounter the full breadth of an artist whose restless imagination continues to redefine the possibilities of figurative art.

Photo: Dana Schutz, Eaters, 2026, Watercolor monotype with handwritten additions in gouache and chalk on Lanaquarelle paper, 126,7 x 101 cm, Courtesy the artist, Two Palms, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin – Basel, and David Zwirner, Photo: Stephen Arnold

Info: Curator: Michael Hering, Pinakothek der Moderne, Barer Straße 40, Munich, Germany, Duration: 10/7-4/10/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-18:00, Thu 10:00-20:00, www.pinakothek-der-moderne.de/