Dana Schutz: Shadow of a Cloud Moving Slowly

Shadow of a Cloud Moving Slowly confirms Schutz's interest in painting as a physical and affective space where imagined crises and social relations are held in tension. The paintings depict a beleaguered and bruised cast of characters that grope in the dark, stuggle together in isolation, and wander alone in colour fields. Clouds fall like rocks from above, and a smoky sky, ablaze in green, serves as a vivid backdrop for a vacant-eyed protagonist, while costumed birds shove him from his mountaintop perch. Boaters drift in the darkness as if forever - unmoored, rudderless and disinterested. Their heads, like fruit in a bowl, resemble a still life. Mood, interiority and psychic discord are echoed in setting and landscape: a nomad in the desert is hampered by an eyeball and chain, which locks eyes with the sun, while the monstrous size of Large Model (2020) suggests the figure could stride through the sea at any depth. 

Dana Schutz (b.1976, Livonia, Michigan) lives and works in New York. She graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art with her BFA in 2000. She went on to attend Columbia University, where she finished her MFA in 2002. In this same year, Schutz produced her inaugural show Frank From Observation, an exhibition based on the conceit of Schutz as the last painter representing the last subject: ‘Frank’. Schutz also participated at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture residency in Skowhegan, ME, and the Norwich School of Art and Design in the United Kingdom. 

Testing painting as an affective space, Schutz’s work often includes subjects—either singular, coupled, or grouped—in creative, social or violent activities. Composed in a discrete manner, her paintings loosely allude to instances of heightened interiority, subjective experience or imaginative systems or situations. Their delivery is often comprised through modes of maximalist decadence and destruction; their friction emotive: shame, embarrassment, masochistic wit, anxiety or precarity are frequent emotive registers. This fragility often manifests from extreme contexts, which thematic series have reinforced. For instance, Schutz’s The Self-Eaters (2003) series shows subjects in acts of auto-cannibalism: form takes on formlessness in each subject’s malleability to both destroy and regenerate.

Larger works have incorporated tangled subjects in dynamic, wonky narratives which contort figure-ground relationships. Space is substituted by time, allowing for moments to collide and collapse. More recent paintings have focused on specific characters, their intersubjectivity and deep introspection. These have been reinforced by new bronze sculptures, rendering her pictorial elements, specifically their chaos, extant as objects.