“Dana Schutz: If the face had wheels”
Denver Art Museum
100 West 14th Avenue Pkwy
November 10, 2012–January 13, 2013
Miami Art Museum
101 West Flagler Street
January 15–February 26, 2012
Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College
735 Anderson Hill Road
Purchase College, SUNY
September 25–December 10, 2011
Curated by Helaine Posner
Dana Schutz paints with directness and expediency, and her work has an exhilaration that comes from giving form to internal feelings. She is an American symbolist who is sometimes mistaken for a realist. Her paintings often depict scenes that are absurd, goofy, or grotesque: things seen in the mind’s eye. A woman eating her own arm, a nude man lying prone in the desert, someone caught midsneeze— the pictures revel in the power of pictorial visualization. Schutz has a winning curiosity about strange forms that the self, and self-destruction, can take; you can imagine her saying, “Nothing human is foreign to me.” This survey, with more than forty paintings and drawings made over the past decade, will prove Schutz to be that rare thing: a maverick leading the way in the mainstream.