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Lot Essay
Spanning a width of almost two metres, Dana Schutz’s Untitled (2007) presents a fantastical white-fenced garden. Curious building tools are strewn across a foregrounded sandpit—a twisted plumbing pipe, a rake, crumbly bricks and stones—and in the background, water streams from a three-tiered fountain. The painting is a vivid example of the Brooklyn-based artist’s characterful, ambiguous, and often imagined figuration. Drawn to complex contemporary subjects, her works brim with burlesque personality. Here, her backyard is set within a deep purple dream-space and emblazoned with the words ‘I’m Into Small Houses’. It forms part of a series of paintings based around the phrase ‘I’m into’, presented at Schutz’s solo show If it Appears in the Desert at Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin (2008). ‘I liked the phrase because it’s a way that people formulate a portrait of themselves’, she said. ‘It’s so casual, almost vague, but when you see what people are really into it can get really specific—and sometimes alarming’ (D. Schutz, quoted in If the Face Had Wheels, exh. cat. Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase 2011, n.p). Fusing text, portraiture, still life, and landscape into one vivid tableau, I’m Into Small Houses exemplifies the layered work of one of the twenty-first century’s most provocative and irreverent painters.
Born in Livonia, Michigan, Schutz studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine, before receiving her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art and MFA from Columbia University, New York. Her works reveal a critical interest in the nature of pictorial space. Where the Abstract Expressionist and Neo-Expressionist painters—whom the artist closely followed as a student—had harnessed the materiality of their medium, drawing attention to the surface of their canvases, Schutz expresses a desire to reinstate painting as a container of multiple spaces and multiple planes. ‘There is the deep space of the painting and there is also the actual space of the rectangle that it’s on’, she says. ‘I constantly go back and forth between the two’ (D. Schutz, quoted in R. Enright and M. Walsh, ‘I Like the World and the World Likes Me: An Interview with Dana Schutz’, Border Crossings, May 2015, online). Here, she invites the viewer to delve deep into the garden, catching our eye with the skewed picket fence, while simultaneously addressing the work’s flatness with superimposed red and orange lettering. Schutz’s use of text draws parallels to the work of Ed Ruscha, and demonstrates a shrewd recognition of the storied relationship between paint, gesture, illusion, and the picture plane. The bent pipe marks an additional visual quote, denoting the cover of Mike Oldfield’s iconic 1973 album Tubular Bells.
Forging a dialogue between subject matter and material, I’m Into Small Houses invites us to contemplate the canvas itself as a site of construction, and indeed deconstruction. The small, wide-toothed rake—cast aside like a painter’s tool—has traced grooved lines through the sand. An abstract brushstroke of its own, it pays homage to twentieth-century legacies of ‘painterliness’. Elsewhere, Schutz represents objects in their essential material forms— bricks, loose stones and pipes—and establishes a crafty metaphor for art-making. She cites Picasso among other European Expressionist painters such as Edvard Munch, Otto Dix and George Grosz as major influences. Here, she nods to her predecessors’ radical breakdown of form into faceted shape, colour, and line. ‘Her style takes care of itself—it has real work to do’, American painter and writer David Salle has stated. ‘It builds rather than illustrates. Her approach to form doesn’t come out of cartooning; she doesn’t just draw with the brush. She is a constructor, and the structures that emerge from the paint are the right ones’ (D. Salle, ‘Dana Schutz’, Artforum, December 2011, p. 247).
Born in Livonia, Michigan, Schutz studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine, before receiving her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art and MFA from Columbia University, New York. Her works reveal a critical interest in the nature of pictorial space. Where the Abstract Expressionist and Neo-Expressionist painters—whom the artist closely followed as a student—had harnessed the materiality of their medium, drawing attention to the surface of their canvases, Schutz expresses a desire to reinstate painting as a container of multiple spaces and multiple planes. ‘There is the deep space of the painting and there is also the actual space of the rectangle that it’s on’, she says. ‘I constantly go back and forth between the two’ (D. Schutz, quoted in R. Enright and M. Walsh, ‘I Like the World and the World Likes Me: An Interview with Dana Schutz’, Border Crossings, May 2015, online). Here, she invites the viewer to delve deep into the garden, catching our eye with the skewed picket fence, while simultaneously addressing the work’s flatness with superimposed red and orange lettering. Schutz’s use of text draws parallels to the work of Ed Ruscha, and demonstrates a shrewd recognition of the storied relationship between paint, gesture, illusion, and the picture plane. The bent pipe marks an additional visual quote, denoting the cover of Mike Oldfield’s iconic 1973 album Tubular Bells.
Forging a dialogue between subject matter and material, I’m Into Small Houses invites us to contemplate the canvas itself as a site of construction, and indeed deconstruction. The small, wide-toothed rake—cast aside like a painter’s tool—has traced grooved lines through the sand. An abstract brushstroke of its own, it pays homage to twentieth-century legacies of ‘painterliness’. Elsewhere, Schutz represents objects in their essential material forms— bricks, loose stones and pipes—and establishes a crafty metaphor for art-making. She cites Picasso among other European Expressionist painters such as Edvard Munch, Otto Dix and George Grosz as major influences. Here, she nods to her predecessors’ radical breakdown of form into faceted shape, colour, and line. ‘Her style takes care of itself—it has real work to do’, American painter and writer David Salle has stated. ‘It builds rather than illustrates. Her approach to form doesn’t come out of cartooning; she doesn’t just draw with the brush. She is a constructor, and the structures that emerge from the paint are the right ones’ (D. Salle, ‘Dana Schutz’, Artforum, December 2011, p. 247).