Installation view, Dana Schutz: Jupiter’s Lottery, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Installation view, Dana Schutz: Jupiter’s Lottery, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Dana Schutz: Jupiter's Lottery
David Zwirner is pleased to present new work by Dana Schutz (b. 1976) at 525 and 533 West 19th Street in New York. This is Schutz’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and coincides with the major survey Dana Schutz: The Visible World, on view from October 2023 to February 2024 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, where it traveled from the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark.
On the occasion of the exhibition, David Zwirner Books will publish a catalogue featuring newly commissioned essays on the artist’s work by Jarrett Earnest. Additionally, a new Phaidon monograph on Schutz’s work includes contributions from Hamza Walker, Dan Nadel, and Lynne Tillman.
Image: Dana Schutz in her studio, 2023. Photo by Jason Schmidt
Dates
November 2—December 16, 2023
Opening Reception
Thursday, November 2, 6–8 PM
Gallery Hours
Tues—Sat 10am–6pm
Artist
Installation view, Dana Schutz: Jupiter’s Lottery, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Installation view, Dana Schutz: Jupiter’s Lottery, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Installation view, Dana Schutz: Jupiter’s Lottery, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Installation view, Dana Schutz: Jupiter’s Lottery, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Among the artist’s most ambitious in scale and complexity to date, the viscerally evocative paintings and sculptures in Jupiter’s Lottery depict allegorical scenes in which often grotesque characters negotiate their subjecthood. Painted wet-on-wet, the characters’ organic forms are echoed in the gestural sculpture also present in this exhibition.
Dana Schutz
The Hill, 2023
Oil on canvas
114 x 168 inches (289.6 x 426.7 cm)
Dana Schutz, The Hill, 2023 (detail)
Dana Schutz, The Hill, 2023 (detail)
Dana Schutz, The Hill, 2023 (detail)
Dana Schutz, The Hill, 2023 (detail)
“In allowing herself to paint the visible world more or less metaphorically, [Schutz] opens up meaning beyond language. All the more so because she dares to confront her personal experience of news media—this ceaseless barrage of unforeseen worries—with the formidable ramifications of the history of painting. If she is known as a painter of contemporaneity, she is as much that of ‘uncontemporaneity.’”
—Fabrice Hergott, director, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
Dana Schutz
Dear Painter, 2023
Oil on canvas
86 x 120 inches (218.4 x 304.8 cm)
In Dear Painter, a large-headed woman lies in bed, being posed both as a subject and a painter in a staged studio-like space. Against a bright green backdrop, she seems unwell, staring vacantly, her large head resembling that of a mascot, as she is being dressed and painted.
Dana Schutz, Dear Painter, 2023 (detail)
Dana Schutz, Dear Painter, 2023 (detail)
Dana Schutz in her studio, 2023. Photo by Jason Schmidt
Dana Schutz in her studio, 2023. Photo by Jason Schmidt
Dana Schutz in her studio, 2023. Photo by Jason Schmidt
Dana Schutz in her studio, 2023. Photo by Jason Schmidt
“The making of the paintings [is] as visible as the activities of the [characters], presenting many opportunities to explore the beauty and grotesque possibilities of the figure, as well as multiple allegories about art-making itself.”
—Dan Nadel, curator-at-large, Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles, in Dana Schutz (Phaidon, 2023)
Dana Schutz
The Gathering, 2023
Oil on canvas
108 x 252 inches (274.3 x 640.1 cm)
Dense with color and mood, Schutz’s paintings make the human predicament visible and the indescribable felt. The Gathering, the largest work in the show, evokes the narrative structure and horizontality of a history painting. In a rural landscape dotted with distant fires, figures take part in an ominous communion.
In paintings such as The Arbiters, figures huddle around tables carrying out gruesome exchanges. Other works depict intimate scenarios where representation operates on a continuum, as subjects appear like puppets, material apparitions, or constructions.
Dana Schutz
The Arbiters, 2023
Oil on canvas
94 x 120 inches (238.8 x 304.8 cm)
Dana Schutz, The Arbiters, 2023 (detail)
Dana Schutz, The Arbiters, 2023 (detail)
“[Schutz's] paintings advance the role of imagination in art in a painting-specific way: It’s one thing to see this or that image in the mind’s eye, but it’s another thing to paint it. Schutz does so in a way that feels natural and unforced.”
—David Salle, artist
Dana Schutz
The Face, 2023
Oil on canvas
108 x 138 inches (274.3 x 350.5 cm)
Schutz’s tragicomic situations are populated by characters preoccupied with self-preservation as they tilt towards oblivion. With mask-like features—all jaws and noses—they emerge, in groups and pairs, out of the painterly atmosphere. The depicted subjects are volumetric and malleable, like drifting clouds.
Dana Schutz
The Love, 2023
Oil on canvas
78 x 72 inches (198.1 x 182.9 cm)
Installation view, Dana Schutz: Jupiter’s Lottery, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Installation view, Dana Schutz: Jupiter’s Lottery, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Installation view, Dana Schutz: Jupiter’s Lottery, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Installation view, Dana Schutz: Jupiter’s Lottery, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
“Schutz practices an art of discrepancy. In this discrepancy lies the humor and disquiet of an artwork that shirks classical unity to assume an allegorical structure.… [She] paints people who make and unmake themselves through one and the same action, and her paintings do something similar, so that their substance often seems to consist mainly of the loose seams and false or makeshift joints between their parts.”
—Barry Schwabsky, critic and art historian
Dana Schutz in her studio, 2023. Photo by Jason Schmidt
Dana Schutz in her studio, 2023. Photo by Jason Schmidt
Dana Schutz in her studio, 2023. Photo by Jason Schmidt
Dana Schutz in her studio, 2023. Photo by Jason Schmidt
Dana Schutz
Parrots, 2023
Oil on canvas
94 x 94 inches (238.8 x 238.8 cm)
The theme of painting itself is addressed in works such as Parrots, which depicts three vain beachgoers trying to catch parrots while a wave crashes behind them, washing up hand mirrors and unsettling avian perches. The birds hover like brushstrokes in midair, and the figures dissolve in the gestural cacophony.
Dana Schutz, Parrots, 2023 (detail)
Dana Schutz, Parrots, 2023 (detail)
Dana Schutz’s materials, 2023. Photo by Jason Schmidt
Dana Schutz’s materials, 2023. Photo by Jason Schmidt
Dana Schutz’s materials, 2023. Photo by Jason Schmidt
Dana Schutz’s materials, 2023. Photo by Jason Schmidt
“Informed by early 20th century avant gardes, principally cubism and expressionism … Schutz’s art is an extraordinary and joyful mash-up where a multitude of references and allusions collide. The exhilarating results can be understood as a productive conversation with the history of painting and as a compelling testament to painting’s complex and unending death throes.”
—John Zeppetelli, director, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal
Installation view, Dana Schutz: Jupiter’s Lottery, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Installation view, Dana Schutz: Jupiter’s Lottery, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Schutz creating one of her largest sculptures to date, Sea Group (2022). Footage by Jason Schmidt, Director, and Kayhl Cooper, Director of Photography.
“Recently, I’ve been thinking about moments in the paintings being made as if out of clay—hunks of color, or figures coming out of this dark space.”
—Dana Schutz
Dana Schutz
Sea Group, 2022
Bronze
113 1/2 x 115 3/4 x 98 1/2 inches (288.3 x 294 x 250.2 cm)
Dana Schutz, Sea Group, 2022 (detail)
Dana Schutz, Sea Group, 2022 (detail)
Dana Schutz, Sea Group, 2022 (detail)
Dana Schutz, Sea Group, 2022 (detail)
The exhibition also presents new large-scale sculptures. Modeled in clay before being cast in bronze, these works, Schutz’s largest yet, give three-dimensional, gestural form to her imagined characters and scenes.
Two initial models for Sea Group (2022). Photo by Jason Schmidt
Two initial models for Sea Group (2022). Photo by Jason Schmidt
The fully-built armature for Sea Group (2022). Photo by Jason Schmidt
The fully-built armature for Sea Group (2022). Photo by Jason Schmidt
“[Schutz’s] protagonists have gained weight and substance, and appear to be isolated in bleak empty spaces that feel mythic or postapocalyptic.… With her paint surfaces sometimes verging on low relief, it is unsurprising that … Ms. Schutz is also exhibiting sculpture.”
—Roberta Smith, chief critic, The New York Times
Dana Schutz
Baggage, 2022
Bronze
45 1/2 x 52 x 23 inches (115.6 x 132.1 x 58.4 cm)
Schutz’s sculptures, which she began making in 2018, are of the same pictorial world as her paintings, and the two sides of her practice have since continued to together animate and engage the formal and experimental possibilities of her work.
Dana Schutz
Victor, 2021
Bronze
67 3/8 x 57 7/8 x 35 1/2 inches (171.1 x 147 x 90.2 cm)
“The surfaces of her sculptures — pinched, twisted, scratched — bear the marks of gestures that make them vibrate in a different way than the surfaces of the paintings, giving them their own rhythm, their own type of movement. These sculptures also bear the mark of time. She often seeks to express in them a certain state of suspension, an instant suspended in air.”
—Anaël Pigeat, curator
Dana Schutz
Odalisque, 2022
Bronze
82 x 70 1/2 x 46 inches (208.3 x 179.1 x 116.8 cm)
Schutz forming the clay structure for Sea Group (2022). Photo by Jason Scmidt.
Schutz forming the clay structure for Sea Group (2022). Photo by Jason Scmidt.
The active surfaces of the sculptures show the traces of the artist’s hand and process, lending them a loose immediacy and plasticity that mirrors the newfound physicality of the figures in her paintings.
Dana Schutz
Large Model, 2022
Bronze
90 3/4 x 59 3/4 x 48 inches (230.5 x 151.8 x 121.9 cm)
Dana Schutz, Large Model, 2022 (detail)
Dana Schutz, Large Model, 2022 (detail)
“[Schutz] vivifies present conditions of life on a faltering planet as dramatically as an artist can while staying devoted to aesthetic ideals.”
—Peter Schjeldahl, critic
Dana Schutz
The Gardener, 2021
Bronze
34 x 37 1/2 x 32 1/4 inches (86.4 x 95.3 x 81.9 cm)
The dynamic, shifting forms of these larger-than-life-sized sculptures can only fully be perceived in the round, with figures emerging out of a central mass and set on pedestal-like bases that mimic the post-calamitous terrains of Schutz’s paintings.
Dana Schutz
Sleeping Head, 2023
Oil on canvas
40 x 36 inches (101.6 x 91.4 cm)
“In terms of making [work] now, I do want there to be a feeling of this place and this time. Maybe it’s not explicitly related to depicting the world, but I want to suggest this paranoid time we’re in, this kind of intangible feeling or thing that hovers and then could attach itself to a subject.”
—Dana Schutz
Installation view, Dana Schutz: Jupiter’s Lottery, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Installation view, Dana Schutz: Jupiter’s Lottery, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Inquire About Works by Dana Schutz
Dana Schutz
Sleeping Head, 2023
Oil on canvas
40 x 36 inches (101.6 x 91.4 cm)
Dana Schutz
Ventriloquist, 2021
Bronze
36 3/4 x 32 x 23 1/2 inches (93.3 x 81.3 x 59.7 cm)
Dana Schutz
The Face, 2023
Oil on canvas
108 x 138 inches (274.3 x 350.5 cm)
Dana Schutz
The Love, 2023
Oil on canvas
78 x 72 inches (198.1 x 182.9 cm)
Dana Schutz
Odalisque, 2022
Bronze
82 x 70 1/2 x 46 inches (208.3 x 179.1 x 116.8 cm)
Dana Schutz
The Watch, 2023
Oil on canvas
80 x 80 inches (203.2 x 203.2 cm)
Dana Schutz
Sea Group, 2022
Bronze
113 1/2 x 115 3/4 x 98 1/2 inches (288.3 x 294 x 250.2 cm)
Dana Schutz
The Chase, 2023
Oil on canvas
85 x 88 inches (215.9 x 223.5 cm)
Dana Schutz
Parrots, 2023
Oil on canvas
94 x 94 inches (238.8 x 238.8 cm)
Dana Schutz
Baggage, 2022
Bronze
45 1/2 x 52 x 23 inches (115.6 x 132.1 x 58.4 cm)
Dana Schutz
The Island, 2023
Oil on canvas
94 x 94 inches (238.8 x 238.8 cm)
Dana Schutz
The Gardener, 2021
Bronze
34 x 37 1/2 x 32 1/4 inches (86.4 x 95.3 x 81.9 cm)
Dana Schutz
Victor, 2021
Bronze
67 3/8 x 57 7/8 x 35 1/2 inches (171.1 x 147 x 90.2 cm)
Dana Schutz
Table Scene, 2022
Oil on canvas
94 x 120 inches (238.8 x 304.8 cm)
Dana Schutz
The Walk, 2023
Oil on canvas
84 x 84 inches (213.4 x 213.4 cm)
Dana Schutz
Large Model, 2022
Bronze
90 3/4 x 59 3/4 x 48 inches (230.5 x 151.8 x 121.9 cm)
Dana Schutz
Talking Twin, 2023
Oil on canvas
88 x 75 inches (223.5 x 190.5 cm)
Dana Schutz
Dear Painter, 2023
Oil on canvas
86 x 120 inches (218.4 x 304.8 cm)
Dana Schutz
The Gathering, 2023
Oil on canvas
108 x 252 inches (274.3 x 640.1 cm)