Dana Schutz’s Expressionist Paintings Are Playful, Cruel And Funny
Dana Schutz‘s expressionist paintings are playful, cruel and funny, her cartoonish figures regularly dismembered and cannibalised by each other, some even resorting to eating themselves. She often creates characters within her work such as Frank who’s the last man on Earth, the gravity-phobic person who ties herself to the ground and the myriad of characters who are cut up for a variety of reasons on operating tables.
However, there’s nothing heavy about her subjects, rather she seems to take delight in bringing her characters to life and then chopping them down, chopping them up – it’s a wicked comedy full of humour and light. Take her ‘Self Eaters’ series, rather than being portraits of people consumed with self-loathing they’re Schutz’s vision of a self-sufficient race who eat themselves and rebuild themselves out of their own feces.
Here’s what Schutz said in one of many interviews about her work and it’s subject matter:
The paintings are not autobiographical. Only recently have I started painting some of the things in my life. I respond to what I think is happening in the world. The hypotheticals in the paintings can act as surrogates or narratives for phenomena that I feel are happening in culture. In the paintings, I think in terms of adjectives and adverbs. Often I will get information from people or things that I see, a phrase, or how one object relates to another. I construct the paintings as I go along.
I really fell in love with these paintings and will definitely be trying to keep up with Shutz’s work in the future.
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