Artist Statement: Dana Schutz

Dana Schutz

“Recently, I have been working on a group of paintings loosely hinged on the act of painting a fictional man from observation, and representing the objects that surround us. The paintings are premised on the imaginary situation that the man and I are the last people on earth. The man is the last subject and the last audience and, because the man isn’t making any paintings, I am the last painter.

The pictures oscillate between observational paintings of him posing for me and hallucinatory arrangements of objects, mirages and visions of transitory events. The paintings float in and out of pictorial genres. Still lives 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. I am less interested in the narrative of survival, i.e. how we would find food and what sticks we would use to build the house, than in the man as a subject.

The psychological and representational implications of painting in a world where reality is relational between two people, or, in a world without anyone to check reality against, is a starting point for these paintings. The man disappears from the paintings and then reappears. When the man is not present, the paintings become hallucinatory, symbolic and irrational. Tangents are important to my way of thinking and way of working. Often, the paintings’ meanings or interpretations are contingent on their relationship to one another. Earlier this year, I was making paintings based on groups of beginning sculptors. The sculptors would go out into nature to make sculpture and then go home, leaving their sculpture behind. I was also painting sneezes, and the gaze of people who could see the future. The disjunction between what is presented and what remains unseen is central to many of the paintings. In my work, I imagine a place, a moment, and a fictional situation, which meshes the premise of a practical situation with the absurd.”

- Dana Schutz, November, 2002