The Neuberger Museum of Art Hosts Ten-Year Survey of Paintings & Drawings by Dana Schutz

Written by Greg Stamford Sunday, 13 November 2011 22:10

Purchase, NY.- The Neuberger Museum of Art is proud to present " Dana Schutz : If the Face Had Wheels", on view until December 18th. The Neuberger Museum of Art has named the extraordinary Dana Schutz as the 2011 winner of its biannual Roy R. Neuberger Prize , which celebrates an artist with an early-career survey and catalogue. The prize is a natural extension of Mr. Neuberger’s lifelong commitment to support the work of living artists. Even before she had reached the age of thirty, Dana Schutz was considered one of the leading artists of her generation. Her imaginative work, filled with inventive stories and hypothetical situations, is strange, humorous, whimsical, disturbing, and oddly compelling, all at the same time. Combining fantasy and reality, humor and horror, her vibrant paintings abound with expressionist energy. "Dana Schutz: If the Face Had Wheels" is the first ten-year (2001-2011) survey of this extraordinary artist’s paintings and drawings.

"If the Face Had Wheels" features thirty paintings and twelve drawings, including work from each of her endlessly fascinating and innovative series - from 'Frank from Observation' (2002), portraying the fictional life of Frank, the last man on earth as depicted by Schutz, the world’s last painter, to recent works from the 'Tourettes and Verbs' series including "Swimming, Smoking, Crying, and Shaking, Cooking, Peeing" (2009). The exhibition is curated by Helaine Posner, Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs at the Neuberger Museum of Art. A fully illustrated catalogue co-published by the Neuberger Museum of Art and Prestel, with an essay by noted art historian Cary Levine and an in-depth interview with Ms. Schutz accompanies the exhibition. Dana Schutz  will travel to the Miami Art Museum and Denver Art Museum in 2012. According to Cary Levine, ambivalence is central to the artist’s work.  “It is what makes her paintings not only strange and beautiful, disturbing and witty, but acutely relevant to our present moment and characteristic of her particular thirty-something age group,” he writes in his catalogue essay. “Her loose gestural painting style amplifies the core ambiguities of her work, as brightly colored, thick, fleshy forms meld into one another, reality becomes unfixed, and the viewer is stuck between cheeriness and sickliness, innocence and cynicism.”


The exhibition begins with "Sneeze" (2001), which depicts the unruly moment of the sneeze that got away, sending gobs of mucus airborne. “Nearly all of Schutz’s paintings engage bodily boundaries — fluids flow forth, innards ooze out, the heavily impastoed flesh is always rendered malleable—evoking not only rupture and decay, but fecundity, growth, and cyclicality.”  Schutz described the painting this way: “A sneeze is something that you can’t entirely capture in a photograph; it’s not visible; you can’t paint it from observation, but everyone has experienced it. I was thinking then, ‘How would you paint it?’ The eyes are squeezed shut, and I wanted the head to be really flat with this explosive eruption coming out of it. I wanted to paint what it feels like to sneeze.” In the "Self-Eaters series" (2004), in which the artist’s creatures are part human, part alien, and eat their own flesh, Schutz was considering issues of creation, destruction, and regeneration. “What if people could digest themselves? Be whatever they could be? How would they come back to life? What if they had a hand in their own making? ... Perhaps they could sculpt new parts of themselves; they could be in a constant state of becoming,” she once explained to a college audience. In many of her recent works, the artist’s protagonists often appear powerless over themselves and their destinies. Verbs, a 2009 series, focuses on “individuals trapped in an angst-ridden present of conflicting tensions and desires. These people not only engage in everyday pursuits, but do several incompatible activities at once,” writes Levine. Hence, we view a woman performing three incongruous acts  simultaneously such as in Shaking, Cooking, Peeing, in which a disheveled woman, standing in a kitchen, grabs a knife as she unsuccessfully attempts to steady a cup of liquid, while ingredients on her kitchen counter cascade to the floor. There is utter loss of control; a disaster in the making. “…Her apparent condition resonates with the madness of ‘normal life’, with the stresses of multitasking and a world of unrealistic and conflicting expectations, of intense personal and social pressures that take their toll on us all.” (Levine)


Dana Schutz was born in Livonia, Michigan in 1976. She received a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2000 and an MFA from Columbia University in 2002. She has had solo exhibitions at the Rose Art Museum , Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts; the Museum of Contemporary Art , Cleveland; and Site Santa Fe; and has been included in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art , New York and The Saatchi Gallery , London; and international events such as the Venice and Prague Biennales. Her paintings are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art , New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art , Los Angeles; the Corcoran Gallery of Art , Washington, D.C.; and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston , among others. In conjunction with the exhibition, the Neuberger Museum of Art will present 'A Conversation with Dana Schutz and Jeremy Sigler' on October 26th at 6:30 pm. In this special program, Dana Schutz will speak with poet, sculptor and critic, Jeremy Sigler. They will bring their unique perspectives to her work created over the last ten years. Sigler is Associate Editor of Parkett and has published five books of poetry, most recently, Crackpot Poet (Black Square Editions/Brooklyn Rail 2010). In his 2007 Brooklyn Rail review of her work, he compared the simultaneous brutality and resolve of many of Schutz’s canvases to an array of his own emphatic art and pop cultural references, including the triumph of a Hollywood Rocky-style boxing match, the lullaby of “It Don’t Worry Me” sung in the aftermath of violence in Robert Altman’s dark comedy Nashville, and the colorful madness of SpongeBob Square Pants.llege School of Art+Design.

Initiated in 1974 with Roy R. Neuberger's donation of 108 works of art, the permanent collection of the Neuberger Museum of Art has grown to over 6000 works of uncompromised quality and variety. Featuring prestigious examples of modern, contemporary and African art, holdings include the Roy R. Neuberger Collection of American Art, the Aimee W. Hirshberg and Lawrence Gussman Collections of African Art , the Hans Richter bequest of Dada and Surrealist objects, the George and Edith Rickey Collection of Constructivist art, and American, Mexican and European master works from the collection of the late Dina and Alexander Racolin. The Neuberger Museum of Art continues to collect and exhibit its permanent collection, enacting Mr. Neuberger's commitment to supporting the work of contemporary artists who examine and expand the ideas of our day. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.neuberger.org

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