Dana Schutz
dal 11/4/2007 al 18/5/2007
Segnalato da
11/4/2007
Dana Schutz
Zach Feuer Gallery, New York
Many of the artist's recent paintings are cryptic and refer to conditions of interiority. Taking place in intimate settings, where figures delineate their physical boundaries, they render the recognizable indeterminate, presenting the everyday and the historical as slightly shifted, particular and mysterious.
Stand By Earth Man
"We live in Fortean times. We live in the beginning of a voodoo age of magic
superstition and ignorance. We are the last
generation that will ever know what it was like, to live in an enlightened
world".
David Thomas (of the Cleveland band Pere Ubu) 1996
Schutz's exhibition "Stand By Earth Man" is titled after a live
performance by "David Thomas and Two Pale Boys" in which
Thomas recalls mishearing Tammy Wynette's "Stand by Your Man" as
"Stand by Earth Man". The paintings in this
exhibition are conceived as stories to our future selves, or miscues to that future.
Many of Schutz's recent paintings are cryptic, narratively incomplete and
refer to conditions of interiority. They take place in
intimate settings, where figures delineate their physical boundaries, looking into
and through pictorial divisions. There
are private spaces where the viewer is blocked from entry and public spaces turned
private where the subject is not
allowed to leave.
Often the viewer is left to meditate on the back of a head or an
unknowable exchange. Objects take on
an uncanny presence and abstraction is used as a secret language. The paintings
depict recurrent phenomena, such
as plague, birth, driving and the tide.
In this exhibition, Schutz uses titles as proposals for the process of articulation
and imagination. The titles "How we would
give birth", "How we would drive, "How we would talk" and
"How we would dance" are simple and meant to touch on
basic activities of our present lives. The tense of these titles locates the subject
in either a speculative past or future,
while alluding to a potential, fictional future audience. Schutz renders the
recognizable indeterminate, presenting the
everyday and the historical as slightly shifted, particular and mysterious.
Dana Schutz was born in 1976 in Livonia, Michigan and received an MFA in 2002 from
Columbia University. She has had
solo exhibitions at the Rose Museum at Brandeis University, Museum of Contemporary
Art Cleveland, and the Nerman
Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas. Her work has also been included in group
exhibitions at the Sammlung Goetz,
Munich, the Royal Academy of Art, London, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
"Stand by Earth Man" is
Schutz's third solo show with Zach Feuer Gallery. She lives and works in
Brooklyn, New York.
Zach Feuer Gallery
530 W. 24th Street - New York