DANA SCHUTZ | Her Arms

LFL Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by David Teiger in December 2003

Paris, Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Self Eaters and the People Who Love Them, January - February 2004
Overland Park, Kansas, Johnson County Community College Gallery of Art, Dana Schutz, April - June 2004, p. 35, illustrated in color, p. 53, illustrated in color (in installation at Johnson County Community College Gallery of Art, 2004)
Purchase, New York, Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York; Miami, Miami Art Museum; and Denver, Denver Art Museum, Dana Schutz: If the Face Had Wheels, September 2011 - January 2013, p. 32, illustrated in color, p. 118 (text)

Peter Halley, "Dana Schutz, Paints Like You Wanted to in High School," Index Magazine, January 2004, p. 34, illustrated in color 
Exh. Cat., Waltham, Massachusetts, The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Dana Schutz: Paintings 2002 - 2005, 2006, p. 85 (text)
Joe Fig, Inside the Painter's Studio, New York, 2009, p. 177, illustrated in color (in the artist's studio)
Jonathan Safran Foer and Barry Schwabsky, Dana Schutz, New York, 2010, p. 45, illustrated in color
Karen Rosenberg, "The Fantastic and Grisly, Envisioned," The New York Times, October 6, 2011 (text)
Daniel Belasco, "Transformer: Dana Schutz," Art in America, November 1, 2011, p. 143 (text)
David Salle, "Dana Schutz," Artforum, December 2011, p. 246, illustrated in color (in installation at the Neuberger Museum of Art, 2011)
Heike Wollenweber, "Simultaneous Shock; Awe, Dana Schutz: If the Face Had Wheels, Miami Art Museum," Aesthetica, February 9, 2012 (text)

Dana Schutz’s larger than life, emotive and highly expressionistic paintings spring from uncanny scenes from her imagination. Rendered in a wild array of colors and textures, employing broad brushstrokes with thickly impastoed strokes of the palette knife, Her Arms, 2003 is a monumental and larger than life-sized portrait of Kim Gordon, the front woman to the legendary punk rock band Sonic Youth. Gordon is readily identified by her signature platinum blond cropped hair-do, her imposing stance and long, strong arms and hands that clutch a guitar. Never a stranger to whimsy and humor, as well as the macabre and obscene, Schutz continually pushes the bounds of subject matter within her oeuvre. Her Arms is a seminal work, painted when Schutz was only 27 years old, one year after completing her MFA at Columbia. Following her first exhibition in 2002 at Zach Feuer Gallery, Schutz burst onto the New York art scene—even receiving international acclaim when she was included in the 2003 Venice Biennale. Schutz explained of her early body of work, met with wide praise in her now historic show Self-Eaters and the People Who Love Them: “I don’t like the idea of painting from a theme, but I like the idea of a framework that could provide information and a fictional space. I was thinking about making paintings about a group of people who eat themselves. But they don’t eat each other…they are self-eaters. They would never eat each other. They eat themselves to survive because it’s their diet. But then they digest themselves too. They regenerate because they can make sculptures out of their digested material…they could make themselves another arm. And eventually they can reinvent themselves. Ultimately, I thought of the title for the show, and it could change. But I was thinking the show could be called self-eaters and the people who love them. It started off being like therapeutic drawings I was doing...so there’s a self-help element to it. But then I thought this painting sort of related to the one of P.J. Harvey, I wanted to make a big portrait of a woman who was strong and a musician...sort of like a god...goddess. That one is supposed to be Kim Gordon...She doesn’t look as robotic and cool as Kim Gordon. She could sort of fit with them, because I thought the whole situation of the self-eating people could exist in the minds of other people. I wanted to paint Kim Gordon initially because she has these amazing, powerful arms.” (Dana Schutz, quoted in Inside the Painters Studio, pp. 179-180). A star of her most recent 2011-2013 traveling retrospective, Her Arms embodies the artist’s fascination with narrative and figuration transformed by her entirely distinct way of painting.