The Face, one of the first works in Dana Schutz’s absorbing show of recent paintings and bronzes at David Zwirner Gallery, pictures a surreal scene of figures supporting and hiding under a huge mask. Barely able to control the giant visage, one character bends over to pick up a rock, perhaps intending to fire it in anonymity at a foe (us?) from behind the face. Rife with allegory, Schutz’ new work configures various groupings of individuals in unclear yet meaningful interactions – gathering to paint together, sitting on a couch as if on a talk show or clustered together in a circle, arms on shoulders. Crowded into the picture plane, dynamic and rendered in vibrant colors, the figures recall not only the exaggerated features of Italian Commedia dell’arte masks but theatrical storylines that foreground human folly. (On view in Chelsea through Dec 16th).
Dana Schutz, The Face, 108 x 138 inches, oil on canvas, 2023.
A fish-headed creature with legs runs desperately on a treadmill in this painting by Dana Schutz, epitomizing the pervasive anxiety and grotesque shape-shifting that energize her huge new paintings at Petzel Gallery. In one of the show’s largest paintings, Schutz depicts a mountaintop crowded with oddball characters with competing interests (from a landscape artist to a yogi), none of whom look enlightened. Elsewhere, a worried man in a business suit carefully washes a monster he can’t escape. Malaise abounds in Schutz’s portrayal of a dangerous and uncertain world. (On view at Petzel Gallery through Feb 23rd).
Dana Schutz, Treadmill, oil on canvas, 90 x 96 inches, 2018.
Dana Schutz’s ‘Fight in an Elevator,’ the title piece for her show at Chelsea’s Petzel Gallery, recalls NFL player Ray Rice’s scandalous attack on his fiancée in a hotel elevator but levels the playing field as an abstracted man and woman give as good as they get in a futurist-inspired rumble. (Through October 24th).
Dana Schutz, Fight in an Elevator, oil on canvas, 96 x 90 inches, 2015.
Carol Bove, Sterling Ruby, Dana Schutz, installation view. Photograph courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York City.
At first glance, the works of Carol Bove, Sterling Ruby and Dana Schutz wouldn’t seem to have much in common besides their creators’ hot-artist status. Yet an undercurrent of aggression unites their otherwise disparate efforts. Bove’s unusually severe sculptures, Ruby’s antiauthoritarian sculpture and painting, and Schutz’s gruesome canvases (including one showing a finger sliced in a fan) range from bold elegance to cheeky flipness in their flirtation with darkness.
Bove’s huge Plexiglas-and-expanded-sheet-metal boxes are the surprise of the show: a cold departure from her intimate assemblages of books and ephemera nostalgically evoking the ’60s and ’70s. The diamond-patterned mesh covering the top, bottom and sides of these rectangular objects explains the title, Harlequin, perhaps after Picasso’s predilection for that subject; here, they become obstreperous gatekeepers, obstructing access to the back galleries.
Bove’s works would have made an interesting match with Ruby’s creepy cage sculpture from his last solo show at Pace Gallery; instead, the latter is represented by the comparatively refined Consolidator, a dark-brown sculpture resembling a cross between a cannon and a coffin, whose title, scrawled across its face, exudes a vague corporate threat. A nearby painting references both a notorious nightclub and a supermax prison, starkly contrasting freedom with lockdown.
Lack of self-control afflicts Schutz’s hapless characters, which include an escape artist who’s pinned himself to a target with knives, and the numskull whose appliance-sliced finger has just generated a tasteful if gory modernist abstraction. After Bove’s monuments to the beauty of power and Ruby’s ominous embodiment of fear, Schutz’s tongue-in-cheek portrayals are laugh-out-loud funny, and the highlight of this show.
Originally published in Time Out New York, issue 775, August 5-11, 2010.
