The exciting new work of Dana Schutz

kestnergesellschaft
Sep 22, 2014 1:31PM

The Brooklyn artist Dana Schutz has a new series of humourous and exciting works. Her latest series of paintings explores God as a motif. Schutz is not interested in religious worship, but in examining a central, representative problem: What would a god look like without religion? As a child, Schutz imagined God as a pop-cultural figure composed from various mass-media sources—a mix of Liberace, the restaurant mascot Bob’s Big Boy, and the moon character from a McDonald’s commercial in the 1980s. These most recent God paintings are no less absurd. They show figures that consist of inanimate, animal and human parts and are as frightening as they are fascinating.

In examining Schutz's entire body of work, we see that she pursues a new kind of expressionist painting that is intensely colorful and emotional, but presents itself neither as subjective nor as purely figurative. Her pictures focus on impossible scenarios and grotesque depictions of bodies that exhibit a captivatingly sober approach to painting.

Explore kestnergesellschafts current show for more images and insight.

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