Dana Schutz at Zach Feuer

Dana Schutz cut blob-shaped holes into two of the 14 paintings in her new exhibition, "Stand By Earth Man." The variously sized holes, a handful in each canvas, are dispersed across the nude figures of Male Model and Female Model (all works 2007) and seem fathomless because of the black velvet behind them. Day Dreamer is uncut but features the same disrupting black shapes, this time as stains from a leaking pen in the pocket of a reclining man's shirt. Schutz's blobs disturb the repose of her pictures while articulating a recurring theme of productive rupture. How we would give birth hilariously depicts a blank-eyed newborn making a bloody mess as he or she squeezes out of the mother's vagina. Mother, meanwhile, stares into an Albert Bierstadt landscape on the wall behind. (Is she noticing the tiny waterfall spilling as if from between the legs of mountains in the distance?) Mother and child are making a big stain-painting on the sheets while a floral pink box of Kleenex waits absurdly on the dresser.

Schutz's blobs reappear as bloodlike rust spots strewn across the front door of the truck in How we would drive. A shirtless male looks back at us from the driver's side while his slouching smear-faced female passenger hangs her arm out the window. A sense of menace haunts this hot day of cigarettes and driving around. Distinctions between objects slur or break down; the hand on the steering wheel could belong to either the man or the woman; a side-view mirror on the near side of the vehicle reflects a reverie of landscape bits, other mirrors and a woman wearing a grass skirt.

With prodigious descriptive powers, Schutz paints conjectures as if they were conclusions--as if she were painting from life. Gravity, light, space and living people are vividly conjured with a sense that they could all, perhaps, collapse back into undifferentiated brushwork and abstraction. She suggests a comic world encumbered by weight and mass, threats and rewards, pasts and futures. The phrase "How we would" that begins the title of many new paintings suggests qualities of contingency at odds with the assertive presence of her depicted objects. Schutz characterizes her new work as "miscues to the future," which is perhaps what all artworks are; less common is the way she folds that imagined future into the narrative. Dad pictures the upside-down word "DAD" inscribed, as if with a finger, in sand near the water's edge. Dad's now-dry paint anticipates the washing away of both word and man.

How we cured the plague, at 10 by 12 feet, was the biggest and most ambitious painting in the exhibition. A naked male, with outstretched arms and many tumors, stands on a pedestal in a large room surrounded by cages of monkeys, flying birds, a shark, doctors and nude people milling about or lying on cots. Fluids play an important role, collecting in plastic IV bags, flowing between species through inserted tubes or forming puddles on the floor. How we cured the plague is a science-fiction history painting infused with anxieties about biological boundaries and group dynamics. For Schutz, painting is a strenuous solitary activity that registers the stresses and longings of a life among others. Her work articulates a brilliant cosmopolitanism with unpretentious directness.

COPYRIGHT 2007 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning