Dana Schutz: Still Life

DANA SCHUTZ: Still Life

February 7^th - March 21^st

Shaheen Modern and Contemporary Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by New York based painter and Cleveland Institute of Art alumnus Dana Schutz. This will be Schutz's first one-person gallery exhibition outside of New York, and she will be returning to Cleveland for the occasion.  There will be an opening reception for the artist on Friday, February 7^th from 5:30 to 8:00 p.m.  The exhibition will continue through March 21^st.  On Wednesday, February 5^th, the artist, along with gallery owner, Brett Shaheen, will be an on-air guest on WCPN/90.3 F.M. radio's "Around Noon with Dee Perry" (12 noon- 12:30 p.m.) to discuss the exhibition.

Upon graduating from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2000, Dana Schutz moved on to attend Columbia University's prestigious graduate art program, where she received her M.F.A. in painting this past May.  Since completing her first year at Columbia, Schutz's paintings have appeared in group exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Stockholm, Sweden.  Her recent (and first one person gallery) exhibition at LFL Gallery in New York met with resounding praise from collectors, critics and fellow artists. 

For her exhibition at SHAHEEN, Shutz has executed six (mostly larger scale) somewhat hallucinatory vignettes that subvert traditional perceptions of and expectations surrounding the canonical genre of still life. Through the artist's ultra-imaginative vision and deft, exceptionally versatile command over her medium, the traditional inertia of still life gives way to an undercurrent of instability and eminent transformation. According to Schutz, "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 ... In my work, I imagine a place, a moment, a fictional situation, which meshes the premise of a practical situation with the absurd."  The lyrical and sometimes sculptural application of paint with which Schutz holds her playful compositions and the seemingly disparate cast of pictorial elements that populate them in dynamic counterbalance simultaneously drives her paintings to the verge of internal collapse, or spinning off into a wild network of tangents.