Dana SchutzLe monde visible

Dana Schutz. The Visible World includes forty paintings from the early 2000s until today,alongside twenty drawings and etchings and seven sculptures.

Dana Schutz is a storyteller. Her work builds a world of unruly characters, human folly, deadpan predicaments and physical calamity. She often paints a dystopic portrait of today’s world, untethered to traditional notions of beauty. A virtuoso in her use of colour, over the years she has honed a sense of dramatic tension which is revealed in her intricate compositions. Her paintings depict imaginary scenes inspired by hypothetical situations, physical improbabilities, contemporary life and language.

This exhibition outlines various themes that can be found throughout her work: intangible subjects, often portrayed with humour; artists at work; the transformation and construction of the self; and tensions between the individual and the collective.

In recent years, Schutz has added sculpture to her artistic practice, extending her gestures and forms in clay. Coming full circle, the subject of sculpture can be found in her earliest paintings. Recently her paintings have become more volumetric and allegorical, increasingly populated with clusters of colourful characters who may be floating through the night, perched upon an island of jawbones, or fighting to stand on top of a mountain.

These visions of a post-apocalyptic world are influenced by her take on art history, from Bruegel to Alice Neel. They evoke the obsolescence of an ailing world, the vanity of contemporary mythologies and the breakdown of communication. Taken from a painting of the same name, the exhibition title The Visible World acts a proposal and a contradiction — illuminating the formless and the imaginary.

The exhibition Dana Schutz. Le monde visible, is organised by the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris in close collaboration with the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art of Humlebæk (Denmark).

Dana Schutz was born in 1976 in Livonia (Michigan). She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
 

Curator : Anaël Pigeat, assisted by Alexandra Jouanneau