Dana Schutz

Garnering critical attention from the outset of her career, Dana Schutz is known for cartoonish figures and narrative- infused compositions that draw upon the history of painting. Often depicting dystopic scenarios, though with wit and humor, Schutz’s paintings have featured “self-eaters”—figures who devour their own hands, arms, chests, and even faces—as well as a character named Frank, whom the artist imagines in a scenario in which she is the last painter alive and he the last man on Earth. Alluding to the works of René Magritte, Pablo Picasso, and Philip Guston, many of Schutz’s compositions can be interpreted as investigations of what painting means today—bodies being broken apart, dissected, augmented, digested, and reassembled evoke the very process of constructing a painting. Likewise, her pointed references to celebrity, technology, history, and current events bring to light the varied topics painting can address in the twenty-first century. 

Her 2012 drawing Building the Boat While Sailing shares its title with a large- scale painting she made prior to the work on paper. The figures in both are busily engaged in various activities, from useful actions like sawing wood to less industrious ones like squirting water from one’s mouth. Schutz based the overall composition on Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, an iconic early nineteenth-century painting of a shipwreck featuring—not unlike her own work—living and dead bodies in various states of distress.