Rising contemporary painter Dana Schutz featured during Rose winter 2006 season

Released on December 09, 2005
Contact: David E. Nathan 781-736-4203 or dnathan1@brandeis.edu

During its winter 2006 season, The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis will feature the work of 29-year-old Dana Schutz, whose ecstatically imaginative paintings, executed in a vibrant, subjective palette, have established her as one of the rising young stars of contemporary art.

“Dana Schutz: Works from 2002-2006,” curated by Rose interim director and curator Raphaela Platow, will be exhibited from Jan. 19-April 9, 2006, in The Rose’s Lois Foster Wing. The show will feature more than two dozen of the artist’s works created in the last four years along with new paintings specifically created for the exhibition.

The Rose’s winter 2006 season will also feature a new installation of New York-based artist Oliver Herring’s work, “On the Cusp,” in the Mildred Lee Gallery, and continue to feature “ ‘Post’ and After: Contemporary Art from the Brandeis University Collection” in the Rose building.

Coordinated by Platow, the Schutz show represents the artist’s first one-person exhibition in an East Coast museum.

Schutz will serve as the Ruth Ann and Nathan Perlmutter Artist in Residence at Brandeis. The residence invites emerging artists on the cusp of international acclaim to work with students and the larger Brandeis community in conjunction with an exhibition at the museum.

“Schutz creates her figurative paintings in thick, glutting strokes, similar to sculpting the image from paint,” Platow said. “Many of her works depict hypothetical scenarios that are based on reality, but extended into the imaginary based on the parameters the artist sets for her narratives. In other works, Schutz attempts to paint things that one almost cannot imagine visually, such as her series of ‘Self-Eaters.’ In these works, Schutz explores the age-old question of the relationship between the maker and the made.”

The exhibition brings together significant examples of Schutz’s different bodies of work, including a selection of paintings from the fictitious narrative “Frank from Observation,” a series of 12 paintings featuring the title character. First exhibited at the LFL Gallery in New York in 2002, “Frank from Observation” was Schutz’s first solo show and earned her international attention.

Schutz’s show at The Rose will also display important examples of her “Self-Eaters” paintings that depict figures devouring themselves and revolve around the continuous process of making and remaking. Additional works depict the construction and destruction of imaginary societies; visualize feelings, actions, and body conditions; focus on actual political happenings; and feature musicians.

Schutz describes her work as pictures that “float in and out of pictorial genres. Still-lifes become personified, portraits become events, and landscapes become constructions. I embrace the area between which the subject is composed and decomposing, formed and formless, intimate and alive.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a 96-page hardcover book, the first major publication of Schutz’s work. It features more than 40 color reproductions and includes essays by Joerg Heiser and Katy Siegel, and a conversation between Platow and Schutz. The book costs $30.

Born in Livonia, Mich., in 1976, Schutz lives and works in New York. She earned her bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the Cleveland Institute of Art and received her master’s from the Columbia University School of Fine Arts in New York. She has also studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and the Norwich School of Art and Design in England.

Recent solo exhibitions include Site Santa Fe, New Mexico; Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin; JCCC/Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kan.; LFL Gallery, New York; and Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris. Group exhibitions include The Saatchi Collection, London; Kunsthalle Mannheim, Germany; The Venice Biennial, Italy; and The Prague Biennial, Czech Republic.

“ ‘Post’ and After” features works from The Rose’s collection by leading post-modernist artists Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Louise Lawler, and Haim Steinbach, and a younger generation of artists, including Gregory Crewdson, Roxy Paine, and Matthew Barney. The collection display investigates the afterlife of the once all-defining concept of post-modernism.

“Contemporary art, it now seems, can’t be identified with post-modernism, though it is clearly no longer ‘modernist’ either,” said Siegel, the curator and The Rose’s fourth Henry Luce Visiting Scholar in American Art. “New questions arise. Did the conditions post-modernism described apply only for a brief moment or did they point to more fundamental change in the conditions of culture? How do we understand these conditions today? And if post-modernism no longer described the contemporary world, how do we define contemporary art?”

Siegel is an associate professor of art history and criticism at Hunter College, City University of New York. A contributing editor to Artforum magazine, she is the co-author (with Paul Mattick) of Art Works: Money (Thames & Hudson, 2004), and the author of the forthcoming Abstract Expressionism (Phaidon, 2006). She has written many catalogs and articles about contemporary artists such as Matthew Barney, Lisa Yuskavage, Takashi Murakami, and Richard Tuttle, as well as critical essays on topics including the crowd in contemporary art, public art, and the phenomenon of the young art star.

In the Mildred Lee Gallery, Herring’s politically charged installation “On the Cusp” features the artist’s recent series of photo-sculptures. For the enigmatic works in the exhibition, the artist painstakingly photographed volunteer models from all possible angles over a long period of time. He then cut and pasted the photographs onto life-size sculptural forms of his subjects to create three-dimensional multifaceted portraits.

The works are the byproduct of developing an intimate relationship with a stranger. “I usually wait for a moment that brings out some kind of vulnerability,” Herring said. “That’s what I’m after, this personal connection with a stranger.”

Herring was born in Heidelberg, Germany, in 1964, and lives and works in Brooklyn, N.Y. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Oxford’s Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in England, and a master’s in fine arts from Hunter College in New York. Herring has received grants from Artpace, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

He has had one-person exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art; and the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art.

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