Nick Schutzenhofer: Corsage

SHAHEEN is delighted to present an exhibition of new and recent paintings by Los Angeles based artist Nick Schutzenhofer.  The exhibition will be the artist’s first at the gallery. The exhibition will run from April 19th through June 24, with a reception for the artist on Saturday, May 14th from 6-8pm. 

Attracted to the medium’s intense translucency, brightness, and capacity to dry quickly, Nick Schutzenhofer executes the majority of his paintings in egg tempera – a centuries-old medium seldom used in contemporary painting — on sheets of paper that have been adhered to canvas using rabbit skin glue.  Other works are executed in traditional oil paint, or encaustic on canvas.  Drawing on objects from his immediate domestic environment as a point of departure, Schutzenhofer initiates his paintings by rendering calligraphic marks in an automatic process analogous to casual conversation or jotting notes and symbols on a notepad or in the margins of a book. While his paintings range in size from those that envelop the viewer’s entire body to those that might only frame a torso, each work is driven by the visual proliferation of the minute and peripheral.

The shapes in Schutzenhofer’s works accrue value through repetition; and, as his painterly marks multiply on the surface, recognizable forms, such as faces, figures, flora and fauna emerge tenuously, threatening to fall apart and recede into abstraction just as easily as they materialized in the first place. Marks that coalesce into visual networks evocative of rivers or dense forest canopies also suggest intestines and twisted capillaries. The scenes refer in near- equal measure to the historically weighted subject of figures navigating sublime landscapes, and to that landscape as representative of the figure’s wild interior.  Ultimately, Schutzenhofer’s images require a viewer willing to entertain ambiguity, and one who anticipates that at any moment the parts might lose their hold on each other and topple back into disorder.

Nick Schutzenhofer’s work has appeared in both solo and group exhibitions in Chicago, where he received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2014), and in Los Angeles, where he currently lives and works.

We are indebted to Nick Schutzenhofer and artist/writer Em Kettner, both of whose musings on Nick’s work served as the basis for and are quoted extensively in this text.