Dana Schutz

Dana Schutz

Photo courtesy Zach Feuer Gallery

"Gravity Fanatic" (2005)

Photo courtesy Zach Feuer Gallery

"How we would talk" (2007)

Dana Schutz: Dana Schutz Painting 2002-2005

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After completing her MFA at Columbia University in 2002, she was already showing at the Venice and Prague Biennale the following year. That was when she was spotted by art-world canary Charles Saatchi, who has since bought her work in bulk. Institutional curators have taken note as well, and The Museum of Modern Art now houses her 2005 painting Presentation.

The precise tone of her pictures has intrigued and perplexed spectators: the Saatchi Gallery suggests she “treads a fine line between empathy and repugnance,” and ARTnews says, “her characters are as humorous as they are grotesque, suggesting that the apocalypse might be more comical than horrific.” What is more obvious is that Schutz is an artist of enormous intelligence and awareness, fascinated by the possibilities of her medium.

Schutz’s pictures are vividly colored, highly painterly and present an imaginary world in which mutation is the norm. She has portrayed beings that eat themselves, others that are able to build their dwellings from their own body parts and probably the most disgusting sneeze in the history of art.

Her champion throughout her career has been New York dealer Zach Feuer, who is hosting her latest show of new work, Stand By Earth Man, which opened April 13. ArtInfo spoke with the artist just days after the opening, about this latest collection of paintings.

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Dana, it’s been two years since your last exhibition of new work at Zach Feuer. Do you feel under pressure when you’re preparing for a show?

The pressure’s gotten really crazy in the last three years. Things happen really fast. This time I was nervous beforehand, but I don’t remember whether I’m nervous before every show and then forget that I was nervous. I think it’s scary putting up work at any time. You make it alone and you never know how something’s going to play out once it’s outside of the studio. But I like that tension; I think it’s important.

How do you deal with the pressure?

I work in a studio building with a lot of other people, and it’s out of the way [in Gowanus, Brooklyn] so it’s really easy to concentrate and work. It’s really nice having that. But in the end, you have to keep on making the work that you’re interested in, no matter what. That’s really the only thing you can do.

Does painting always come very naturally to you?

Well, it’s something I always enjoyed. I just really liked it initially. I found it pleasurable and romantic and exciting, but that was when I was 15.

But it seems to be a natural way for you to invent and work out ideas.

Oh yes. You set up your own problems. I like the idea that you could potentially paint anything, or that anything could become a painting—though whether it would be an interesting painting or not would depend on how it was done. But you know, I never consciously think about paint when I’m painting. It’s just that some subject matters can work and some can’t. Or some can spark ideas for paintings and some can’t.

Can you give me an example from the new show?

Well, for example, I started making a list of potential ideas of how we would do things, and one of them was How we would give birth (2007). I thought that could be really interesting, but it was a tough decision whether to paint it or not. When I started to imagine it, it immediately seemed to me that she was looking at something else. I would never have wanted to paint that until I thought of where the woman could be looking. I would never have wanted to paint it if she was just looking at the baby or if it was just about the woman giving birth.

What painting is she staring at?

Oh, I googled “landscape” and I pieced it together from a bunch of different landscapes. There was one that was really horrifying. It was an amateur landscape. It wasn’t even thinly veiled. It looked totally like a woman’s reclining body: the waterfall was the vagina and the mountains were the knees and the breasts, and the mossy outcrops were the toes. But I felt that that would bounce back too much on the viewer. So I mixed that together with a Bierstadt, because I like the warm amber-y palette of the Bierstadt paintings. It feels really far away or alien.