Dana Schutz (American, b. 1976) is an important Contemporary painter. Her work frequently depicts figures participating in violent or creative activities, or in impossible or contradictory situations. Some of her paintings involve elaborate narratives, such as a race of beings that eat themselves (self-eaters), or a figure named Frank who is the last man on earth. “I’m never interested in the painting being a mirror to culture,” Schutz explains. “I think thats really boring. What I’m interested in is painting as an affective space. The place where the hierarchies of the world can be rearranged within the space of a painting.”
Schutz was born in 1976 and raised in Livonia, just outside of Detroit, MI. She began painting at age 15, and in 2000 graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art with her BFA. She went on to attend Columbia University, where she finished her MFA in 2002. She also participated at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture residency in Skowhegan, ME, and the Norwich School of Art and Design in the United Kingdom.
Schutz began exhibiting while she was still in graduate school, and has mounted over 15 solo exhibitions since 2002. These include Fight in an Elevator at Petzel Gallery in New York, Teeth Dreams and Other Supposed Truths at Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin, and If the Face Had Wheels at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, NY. In 2011, her drawings and prints were the subject of an exhibition at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.
Schutz lives and works in New York, NY.
