Curated by John Zeppetelli

Mercifully free of easy irony, gimmicks, and suspended-in-scare-quotes gags, Dana Schutz’s virtuoso painting melds and morphs the oddball corners of modernism—Neue Sachlichkeit, Hairy Who—to produce its own mutant strain. Her work is jubilant body horror, depicting the human figure in all manner of distressed, disheveled, and unhinged states: screaming, laughing, shaving, smoking, caught up in a crowd, hideously dismembered, or arrayed on a dissection slab. Her tableaux are bright, miasmal, anxious—freakish pictures of what yuppified Brooklyn might look like ten years after the Bomb. Among the twenty-some works in this show (the artist’s first solo at a Canadian institution) are several of her best-known pieces—including Face Eater, 2004, and Presentation, 2005—but the Musée d’Art Contemporain will emphasize new work, also presenting a selection of canvases fresh from their debut at New York’s Petzel Gallery earlier in the fall.

— Lloyd Wise