Dana SchutzThe Gardener

In 2021 Dana Schutz painted a new series of pictures, which were exhibited at CFA in Berlin at the end of the year under the title “The Gardener.” After the out-of-print booklet “Waiting for the Barbarians,” in which the fiercely attacked painting “Open Casket” was reproduced that had led to furious activist protests during the Whitney Biennial in 2017, the artist now shows a new, modified style of painting. Today she heightens the expressiveness of her canvases by employing a strong black contour line. Whereas the destructive character of the content of her pictures of 2016 was alarming in an almost sterile form, because she laid out her palette in a strangely friendly and almost “sunny” way in the face of thematically disastrous situations, the new canvases, like a series of sculptures, appear hard and menacing. Dana Žaja describes this as follows in her accompanying text, which is well worth reading: “In Schutz’s pictorial cosmos something dark underlies the most mundane of activities, not least because every form of work seems to be a defiant act against the desolate world. Adaptation and resistance go hand in hand here.”

Exhibition:
Contemporary Fine Arts CFA Berlin, 20/11 – 23/12/2021