Without doubt, the work of the American artist Dana Schutz (*1976), who lives in New York, has for more than two decades counted internationally among the impressive positions in contemporary figurative painting. Again and again the painter succeeds in luring us, with her powerful visual language, into her compositionally dense paintings, so that we lose ourselves in fantastic worlds full of riddles and allegories. At first glance the picture themes seem far removed from our reality. Appearances are deceiving, however, and precisely therein lies the subversive artistic strength. With her characteristic playful lightness, Dana Schutz's pictorial stories hold up a mirror to our existence. In the euphoric swirls of color in her painting, minor and major mishaps and even tragedies appear disguised as modern myths. They raise questions that want to be answered.
Parallel to her painterly work, Dana Schutz has always reflected her pictorial stories in printmaking series.