Dana Schutz: The Gardener

The garden of eternal endeavour

Dana Schutz has painted a new series of paintings in 2021, 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", which featured the fiercely contested painting "Open Casket" that led to angry activist protests during the Whitney Biennial in 2017, the artist is now showing a new, modified style of painting. Today, she exaggerates the expressiveness of her canvases by using a strong black outline. While the destructive content of her paintings from 2016 was frightening in an almost sterile form, because she applied her colour palette in a strangely friendly and almost "sunny" way in the face of thematically disastrous situations, the new canvases, as well as a series of sculptures, appear hard and threatening. Dana Žaja describes this as follows in her well worth reading accompanying text: "In Schutz's pictorial cosmos, there is something dark underlying the most profane activities, also because every form of labour seems to be a defiant act against the desolate world. Adaptation and resistance go hand in hand."

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