A testament to the visual potency of Dana Schutz’s distinctive artistic vernacular, God 2 is a painterly tour-de-force, enveloping the viewer in a mesmerizing cascade of dystopian figuration. Executed in 2013, the present work epitomizes Schutz’s celebrated visual style, through which the artist powerfully fuses abstraction and figuration by means of expressive imagination, fragmented bodies, and thrillingly impossible scenarios. Within the ravaged pictorial space of the present work, a flurry of fractured shapes and planes resolve to reveal a mythic central figure: teeth bared, arms akimbo, this creature is at once fantastical and ferocious, dwelling in the realm between deity and monstrosity.

Describing her work in terms particularly reminiscent of God 2, Schutz reflects: “Recently I have been making paintings of sculptural goddesses, transitory still lives, people who make things, people who are made and people who have the ability to eat themselves.” She continues, “Although the paintings themselves are not specifically narrative, I often invent imaginative systems and situations to generate information. These situations usually delineate a site where making is a necessity, audiences potentially don’t exist, objects transcend their function and reality is malleable.” (Dana Schutz cited in: Exh. Cat., London, Victoria Miro, ‘Painting 2004: Group Exhibition’, 2004 (online)) Testifying to her international acclaim, Schutz’s paintings are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Contemporary Arts, Los Angeles; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas; and the Tel Aviv Museum; Israel, among many others.

Surging forth from a background of neon colors and crisply delineated shapes, the central figure of God 2 powerfully disrupts the familiarity of figuration and abstraction. Full of color and movement, the figure occupies space with a surprising potency for a creature which could never exist in reality, irresistibly capturing the viewer’s imagination. An artist whose work has been described as “teetering on the edge of tradition and innovation,” Schutz’s paintings mine both art history and her own potent visual imagination to collapse time, space and reason within her two-dimensional picture plane. Powerfully exemplified in God 2, her oeuvre draws on the legacies of such touchstone figures such as George Grosz and Max Beckmann, while always allowing Schutz’s own unique talent to explore the expansive possibilities of the painterly medium today. The artist describes, “My paintings are loosely based on metanarratives. The pictures float in and out of pictorial genres. Still lifes become personified, portraits become events and landscapes become constructions. I embrace the area between which the subject is composed and decomposing, formed and formless, inanimate and alive.” (The artist in 2004, quoted in: Victoria Miro Gallery, Painting 2004: Group Exhibition, March 2004 (online))

Just after completing her education at Columbia University in 2002, Schutz burst onto the New York art scene with her first solo exhibition, Frank from Observation, a show based on the conceit of Schutz as the last painter on earth and the imagined ‘Frank’ as the last man on earth. In that show, the metanarrative surrounding Frank – as with the potent figure of God 2 – creates compelling questions within Schutz’s compositions that intrigue and fascinate the viewer. In title and form, the character of the present work invokes images of centuries-old Mesoamerican deities, their mythic silhouettes writ large on the stone walls of ancient temples; we are at once awestruck and cautious of the figure’s inherent power, which seems capable of consuming everything in its path. Ultimately, in its bared teeth and cataclysmic background, the figure of God 2 powerfully typifies the sense of impending catastrophe which characterizes the very best of Schutz’s work: the effect of artistic vision teetering on the edge of controlled chaos

Artist

Dana Schutz