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In her new work, artist Dana Schutz takes back her painterly name.
Like this work or not, Schutz is claiming a lot of visual territory for herself.
This means more tenacity in the paint, irrepressible surfaces, ambitious scale, and mixed conflicted compositional structures.
The cosmic background radiation and explosive blowback of what Schutz triggered in 2017 are still here, of course.
How could they not be?
One that found Schutz protested not by the right wing but rightly by the art world itself.
More on that in a moment.
Schutz has poured all of this and much more into her new, vivid paintings.
Schutzs light was flickering off.
Here it blazes back on.
Her feet are bound in rope or her own underpants.
Maybe its offering sustenance.
The womans expression recapitulates Picassos late wide-eyed-zombie death-mask self-portraits as she peers at us with saucerDemoiselles dAvignoneyes.
Many of the paintings here have pointing fingers.
Indeed, her vagina is rendered as an elongated black serpentine squiggle.
Or this shape is a snake emerging from her a birth of monsters.
Indeed, since the Whitney, Schutz had a second child.
Or sometimes a decapitated head or the jaw of an ass.
TheMountain Groupgives us a lone woman painting atop a mountain.
Schutz is borrowing from, even trying toimproveon, artists from Picasso and Courbet to Beckman and Grosz.
Theres so much Guston in these paintings that its incredible that the work doesnt just self-destruct.
Everything feels very liberating, filled with moxie.
I advise never seeing Schutzs work as only being subject matter or merely pictures.
What makes them pop is how they produce extremely different effects at different distances.
(I kept thinking I saw underwater filter-feeder creatures or clumpy sponges.)
(I fish-headed being dashes madly, spraying huge droplets of sweat.)
That wrinkle has deepened.
Theres more to Schutzs show than meets the eye, however.
Schutz was among very few artists to let go of all of these things.
And it cost her.
This academicism was accompanied by exploding prices.
Now everywhere you look theres work that may be said to connect to Schutzs art.
Theres one thing more.
The Whitney itself hosted one of these meetings.
Schutz recentlytoldtheNew YorkTimes,Its good those voices were heard.
People were infuriated by her painting;Open Casketset off firestorms of public demonstration, indignation, and pain.
Dana Schutz: Imagine Me and You, on view at Petzel Gallery through February 23.
