Dana Schutz

New York-based artist Dana Schutz makes complex works that reflect the ambiguities and frictions of everyday reality. Working across painting, drawing and sculpture, she references pop culture, art history and current events, reimagining the world in strange, impossible terms.

Schutz was born in Michigan in 1976. She studied at the Cleveland Art Institute and Columbia University, completing her MFA in 2002. Among her formative influences were young painters such as Cecily Brown, Laura Owens and Nicole Eisenman. She also admired David Salle, Alice Neel and the German Expressionists.

Schutz achieved critical acclaim early on in her career. Bright colours, expressive brushwork, metamorphic figures and warped geometries quickly came to define her work. Important early paintings included Sneeze (2002, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston) and her major series Self-Eaters (2003–04), depicting figures engaged in acts of auto-cannibalism. In Self-Portrait as a Pachyderm (2005), she painted herself with thick, elephant-like skin. At once humorous and grotesque, these works explored themes of bodily deformation and humiliation, inviting comparison with the paintings of Goya, Francis Bacon and George Condo.

Schutz’s works frequently evoke states of seemingly incomprehensible turmoil. Swimming, Smoking, Crying (2009, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas) belongs to a series depicting women doing three incompatible things at once. Building the Boat While Sailing (2012) reimagines Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19) as an allegory for painting itself, its subjects scrambling to assemble their vessel while cast adrift upon the ocean. Other paintings speak explicitly to the chaos of the modern world. Open Casket (2016), a portrait of Emmett Till which sparked controversy at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, was made in response to ongoing reports of police brutality against Black men.

Schutz has exhibited widely, with notable solo shows at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark. Her works also perform strongly at auction. Elevator (2017) set a new world record price for the artist when it sold for HK$50,050,000 at Christie’s Hong Kong in 2020. A related work, Fight in an Elevator (2015), is held in the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.