The American painter Dana Schutz has been hailed internationally as one of the most important new artists of the 2010s and one of the great figurative painters of our time. Klaus Biesenbach, director of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and former chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, once described the fascination with her unsettling paintings that blend fiction and reality in an inimitable way as follows: “Schutz's paintings caught my eye because they were different from anything I had seen recently—not exactly beautiful, but very true.” And Fabrice Hergott, director of the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, recently attempted to put the painter's extremely enigmatic visual world into words as follows: "Each painting by Dana Schutz is an enclosed world in itself, born out of many influences ... Yet her work is far from being emotionless or even predictable. She subtly combines shapes with ideas in situations that surprise their protagonists [...]". The same is true of our grand painting from the critical “Self Eater” series, in which a female figure with her back turned toward a black sea sits at a picnic, her hands covered in blood; she is not eating the food laid out before her, but rather her face and body, like a juicy melon. The panorama of historical references that Schutz appropriates in this captivating composition is vast. As Schutz's mother was an art teacher and artist, she grew up in a particularly artistic household, where she was exposed to reproductions of masterpieces of Western art from an early age, which would shape her work. In “Gouged Girl,” Schutz combines elements of Romantic painting and Impressionsm with the destructive moment of Francis Bacon's brutal portraiture and formal aspects of comic art to create something entirely new. This enigmatic and captivating subject matter exudes both fascination and unease, attributing a melon's juicy, soft consistency to the human body and thus addressing our mortality in a completely new artistic way.

In 2017, Schutz rose to fame with a highly controversial painting exhibited at the Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Her painting “Open Casket,” also on display there, was based on photos of Emmett Till, a black boy brutally murdered in the 1950s for racist motives, and caused a major scandal. In addition to the themes of grief and social failure, it also addresses our existence's vulnerability and finite nature. Schutz's captivating paintings have featured in important group exhibitions since the mid-2000s, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Most recently, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark, presented the major retrospective “Dana Schutz” (2023), and the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris presented the major solo exhibition “Dana Schutz: Le Monde Visible” (2023/24). Both exhibitions have once again demonstrated the extraordinarily invigorating novelty and power of Schutz's incomparable visual worlds, or in the words of the New York Times: “Dana Schutz gives you hope that painting will endure to the end of our species.” [JS]