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Dana Schutz

09.22.06 - 10.15.06
Exhibition — les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse

Dana Schutz, exhibition view, Les Abattoirs, Toulouse, 2006

© Printemps de septembre, photo André Morin

Born in 1976 in Livonia (USA), she lives in New York.

 

Dana Schutz plunged into painting at the age of 14 and has never looked back. Since then she has been handling bright colours and soft and malleable matter with much delight, and enjoying a meteoric career as a result. Her zany auto-fictions present young teenagers who look like her. They are eaten and piece themselves back together again in an idyllic natural setting where "Franck" is the last man on earth and grown-ups are either zombies or corpses. Both monstrous and jubilant, her work calls on a whole host of references, ranging from Hieronymus Bosch to Philip Guston. Her Fauve palette and her Expressionist touch pay tribute to Van Gogh, her first memory of painting. Dana Schutz, who is fascinated by Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa, infringes the taboos of the flesh and ushers in an apocalyptic world full of cannibals. Her portraits themselves vacillate between flesh and face, as if they were forever reshaping a new identity.