NEW YORK— Upon seeing a work by Dana Schutz, you’re likely to wonder, “How did she imagine that, much less paint it?” Her grotesque and often humorous scenarios have elements of sci-fi and apocalyptic survivalism, but they’re also about the challenge of finding novel approaches to the figure. Her first solo show in Chelsea chronicled the adventures of a fictional last man on earth named Frank. Since then she’s depicted people cannibalizing their own bodies, scientists using sharks to cure the plague, and the founding fathers convening in a watery, psychedelic meeting hall.

Schutz is unusually well-equipped to communicate these startling visions. She has a kind of painterly telepathy, a quality that allows her to delve into Ensor’s crowds and dissect Eakins’s corpses. It doesn’t hurt, either, that she’s a once-in-a-generation colorist.

Within the fickle, contentious art world she’s also known for her loyalty, to longtime dealer Zach Feuer and to the other artists she befriended while getting her MFA at Columbia (she graduated in 2002). These relationships survived an onslaught of attention around 2005, when collectors fought over her paintings and MoMA acquired her immense, prismatic surgery scene, Presentation. The last couple of years have been steadier and quieter, but Schutz’s most recent solo show at Feuer — in 2009 — kept critics guessing with an explosion of pattern and a new acidic palette.

This month, Rizzoli is publishing Schutz’s first monograph, covering a decade of her painting and containing a text by the author Jonathan Safran Foer, one of few people whose visual imagination might be said to equal Schutz’s own. In July she’ll have a solo show at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, at Trinity College in Dublin.

ARTINFO spoke to Schutz about her book, her newest paintings, and the mood of the post-boom art world.

Your new book has a foreword by Jonathan Safran Foer. Do you feel a connection between your painting and his writing?

I met Jonathan a while ago through Sam Messer; I’ve always loved his writing. I actually made a painting based off an email he sent me a while ago, this incredible anecdote about a botanical garden that was once in the Coliseum. It had sprung up from all the seeds embedded in the pelts of animals from all over the world and was fertilized by all the blood that was spilled there. At the time I was working on a series of paintings based on the phrase “I’m into.” One of the phrases I came across online was “I’m into Conceptual Gardening” and I was really thinking about the image that Jonathan’s story created.

The book’s other contributor, Barry Schwabsky, compares you to Emily Dickinson — particularly the paintings of “Self-Eaters,” which remind him of her poem number 773: “Deprived of other Banquet/I entertained myself.”

I had never read Emily Dickinson before, but I loved what Barry wrote. It made me think about what I was painting in a different way. Especially about the face-eater — the face being a site for expression, devoured. I never really thought of my paintings as purely allegorical.

Often your imagery has social and political sources, whether it’s bodies from the Iraq War or overzealous plastic-surgery patients. One of your most recent paintings, for instance (Signing, 2009), shows the founding fathers signing the Declaration of Independence.

I think there’s politics that can be wound up in a lot of different forms, but I never feel that I’m trying to address an issue. I did Signing before the Tea Party got so big.

Another painting in the book that feels oddly prescient is The Autopsy of Michael Jackson, which was made four years before he died.

At the time I was making these paintings that were based on things that were happening in the world, and he was on trial. I remember thinking that he would die in our lifetime. I was thinking about it as a photograph that would be taken that hadn’t been taken yet, and wondering what form he would be in when that picture was taken.