Dana Schutz

Full-color catalog of a solo exhibition by the painter Dana Schutz, at the Johnson County Community College, Gallery of Art, Overland, KS. With an introduction by the painter Tom McGrath and an interview of Schutz by Maurizio Cattelan. Cattlelan's work has featured in three editions of the Venice Biennale (1993; 1997; 1999) and in major venues worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1998); and the Tate Gallery, London (1999). The art critic Meghan Daily writes about Schutz, "As a painter who is advancing on the sheer force of ecstatic imagination, ideation, and subjective color, Dana Schutz just might be our finest contemporary symbolist. In the simplest terms, Schutz gives form to things that do not exist outside of art, and her paintings would seem to avail themselves of the artist's right--so eloquently articulated in Gabriel-Albert Aurier's celebrated 1891 essay "Symbolism in Painting: Paul Gauguin"--to exaggerate, attenuate, or deform an object's qualities not merely in furtherance of his individual vision but in service of the "needs of the Idea to be expressed." (As it happens, Schutz has been looking closely at some of the very artists Aurier praised, Gauguin and van Gogh in particular.) Since she emerged on the scene in 2002, a few months before Columbia's School of Fine Arts awarded her an MFA, Schutz has been showing weird, seemingly improbable, gutsy paintings--a starry-eyed seer, a f! ifty-foot-tall rock star, the last man on earth--each canvas releasing a flood of associations and fantastical possibilities, the way a Moreau or a Redon might." --from "Laying it on thick: Meghan Daily on the art of Dana Schutz", Artforum, April 2004.