Dana Schutz: The Sea and All Its Subjects

The Sea and All Its Subjects reflects the artist’s ongoing interest in constructing improbable scenarios that function as evocative visual allegories. Taking the playfully taxonomic title of the show as a broad starting point, Schutz explores distinct scenes within a vast and enigmatic world while also engendering a proliferation of possible meanings.

In The Patient, a group attempts to transport an ailing female patient using a large cloth, like a canvas physically conveying its subject, while also evoking a quasi-religious or triumphant processional. Her discombobulated body rests uncomfortably on the cloth, as if about to slip off, eluding easy grasp.

The Catch depicts a large idol in the form of a man being swallowed by a giant fish. A group of smaller figures carry the amalgam away on rocky terrain, as fishing lures hang from above. Both fish and man are trapped, and their formal confluence vaguely resembles an inert merman.

Double entendres and failing attempts at communication are evinced in works such as The Medium, which shows a solemn figure being constructed as if out of clay, surrounded by various other people whose sculpting and carving tools lie on the floor nearby. The subject appears to be changing and shifting faster than the sculptors can fashion it; at the same time, it is unclear if they are building it or merely propping it up. The surrounding individuals also seem to be attempting to communicate through the central figure, who forms a sculptural medium as well as a medium between distinct realms.

Mourning an Octopus shows a group mysteriously maneuvering a large octopus into or out of a museum. The creature’s tentacles are camouflaged among the terrazzo floor, which in turn looks like a collapsed starry sky. The paintings hanging behind the figures are varied in style and period, loosely evoking works by artists like Vincent van Gogh, Frans Hals, and Giorgio di Chirico.

The Optometrists shows a group of one-eyed creatures picking up round objects, including various fruits, a deflated medicine ball, and broken eggs. Recalling depictions of the mythical Cyclops by Symbolist painter Odilon Redon (1840–1916), the figures appear to be trading eyes—perhaps in a blind attempt to give each other the gift of sight.

Dense with color and mood, these wet-on-wet paintings are populated with figures that appear to float and drift within impossible, far-fetched scenarios and exist under difficult, absurd circumstances. Characterized by their rich narratives and formal inventiveness, Schutz’s new paintings attest to her continued examination of how subjective experience might be represented, as well as her ability to reveal the deeper ambiguities of the human condition

Other works in the show feature single figures subjected to impossible situations or challenging conditions. In one canvas, a woman sits in a high-tech chair that has the ability to project images, as if it were an extension of the world inside the figure’s mind. The transparent projections depict images of nature—some symbolic, some painterly. The seated figure appears exultant yet somber; her almost religious presence is echoed in her gold necklace, which spells out Glory in looping cursive script.