The art world is always full of new faces coming onto the scene with innovative works of beauty. Dana Schutz lives in Brooklyn, NY and has always taken a tongue-in-cheek look at the world, focusing on subjects as narrative as her beginning point. She first debuted with her Frank from Observation exhibition, and has been big on the scene ever since. Here we take a look at a number of her most famous paintings.
Described as a form of mad genius balancing the delicate point between tradition and innovation, Dana Schutz's work floats in and out of genres of art and style, allowing the individual still life's to become personified. The dark edges of the work give the impression the picnic attendees are slowly burning away.
Twin Parts is a rather fantastic piece of work, involving a strange and misshapen figure pouring over tables and shelves that seem to contain multiple parts that may very well involve the shattered parts of her twin. Or perhaps they're just spares kept around 'just in case'.
This painting is part of a series of works that leave the viewer with a flyaway feeling that paints images and stories of their subjects. Sometimes they're single individuals, other times they're pairs, but in all cases the focus seems to be the scenery more than the 'person' in the painting.
Coming from her The Last Thing You See art pieces, a display of pieces that came to mind without any kind of prompting or context. The pieces are largely anti-social in nature, and she describes the method that inspired them as 'Tourette's Paintings'. Their inspiration and intention is to break up your thoughts by presenting you with shocking and disturbing images.
This image comes from a deliberately disturbing line of images focusing on auto-cannibalism. In this one you can see the tongue of the subject reaching up to consume an eye as he pulls his whole self into his mouth. How many of us consume ourselves over and over again throughout our lives.
This painting seems to comment on the machines and electronics of today's world slowly consuming us more every day. With medical advances and electronics becoming more and more prevalent, the day may come soon where we literally get consumed by the things we consume.
Breeders is an interesting piece, Dana indicates that the piece was inspired by the dissection of Frank, her partner. She broke him down into the band “The Breeders”, so he was broken down into two females. She also chose this subject matter because she is fascinated by female musicians and their place as strong women.
