“I'm never interested in the painting being a mirror to culture. I think that's really boring. What I'm interested in is painting as an affective space. The place where the hierarchies of the world can be rearranged within the space of a painting. And they can be articulated in different ways.”
E voking an atmosphere that is both dreamlike and dystopian, whimsical and thrilling, Untitled exemplifies Dana Schutz’s iconic, electrifying stories while showcasing a rare and visceral handling of text. Executed in 2007, the painting bears the phrase “I’m into small houses” rendered in vivid tangerine and resplendent scarlet against the rich jewel tones of an uncannily domestic environment. The New York-based artist is acclaimed for her psychologically complex, imaginatively devised scenes made exquisitely lucid with expressive brushwork and intoxicating hues, cementing her as one of the most provocative and compelling visionaries of our time.
Art © 2022 Jörg Immendorff
Right: Philip Guston, Painter’s Table, 1973, © National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
Art © The Estate of Philip Guston
The present work is a fantastic relic of contemporary society. Dana Schutz’s surreal backyard toes the line between the desolate and the childlike, delicately littered with banal objects— a cinderblock, a rake, a fountain, an assortment of pebbles— that seem to signal a narrative just beyond reach. The cinematic composition is made more evocative by the imposed text, reminiscent of Ed Ruscha, which invites the viewer to invent their own fictions about the painting as if in collaboration with Schutz in imagining. Untitled is a part of a series first presented in 2008 at Contemporary Fine Arts’ solo exhibition, If it Appears in the Desert, in which Schutz explores the phrase “I’m into.” In the artist’s own words, “I was spending way too much time on the internet around this time and one day I googled the phrase ‘I’m into.’ I liked the phrase because it’s a way that people formulate a portrait of themselves. It’s so casual, almost vague, but when you see what people are really into it can get really specific – and sometimes alarming” (the artist in conversation with Helaine Posner, Exh. Cat., Purchase, Neuberger Museum of Art, If the Face Had Wheels, 2011, Prestel). Such ultra-specific hobbies became the initial thematic ground for her luminous and absurd pictorial spaces as captured by Untitled.
ART © 2022 Edward Ruscha
Following in the enigmatic tradition of Surrealists such as Salvador Dali and Expressionists like Max Beckmann, Dana Schutz transforms commonplace environs into the radiant and bizarre, articulated by her prismatic deployment of color. The uncertain yet vibrant scenery of Untitled coupled with Schutz’s hypnotic manipulation of typography present a striking paradigm of Schutz’s oeuvre that unequivocally speaks to her masterfully lyrical artistry.
