NEW YORK — Dana Schutz’s current show at Petzel Gallery is her best in New York in a while, maybe ever.
She has loaded up her brush again, thickening her paint, and has minimized her settings. Gone are the thin surfaces and sharp-edged shapes that could make her recent works feel brittle and too cartoony. Her protagonists have gained weight and substance, and appear to be isolated in bleak empty spaces that feel mythic or postapocalyptic. Several scenes are set on large lonely rocks like those loved by Homeric poets and symbolist painters.
With her paint surfaces sometimes verging on low relief, it is unsurprising that, for the first time, Schutz is also exhibiting sculpture, a frequent subject in her paintings: five bronzes of her characteristically gnarly figures whose crazed textures amaze and will surely feed back into her painting.
Two years ago, Schutz was at the center of a firestorm ignited by “Open Casket,” one of her paintings in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. The work was based on photographs of the battered corpse of Emmett Till, the teenager who was tortured and murdered by two white men in Mississippi in 1955. Till’s mother insisted that his body be seen and photographed so the world would know what had befallen him, and the resulting images helped ignite the civil rights movement.
For many the pain and importance of the images made them inappropriate for art-making, especially by a white artist. Arguably another artist, regardless of race, might have done justice to the Till images, but not one with Schutz’s comic-grotesque vision and penchant for conflating heroes and villains. As might be expected, given the frequent autobiographical nature of Schutz’s work, several of the new paintings evoke moments of crisis, humiliation, penance and possible redemption that seem related to her recent experience.
“Painting in an Earthquake” shows a female artist from behind, clutching at a painting falling off a collapsing brick wall. In the beautiful, harrowing “Strangers,” a figure seems to attack or punish a second one who is bent over, cringing, face covered, with one large guilty, fearful eye peeking out. The arid setting seems ancient, maybe biblical: The ground is strewn with what look like jawbones, possibly of donkeys, like the one Samson used to slay a thousand Philistines. Attention to Philip Guston’s late paintings, felt throughout the show, is especially strong here, but Schutz tends to stretch rather than lean on it.
“The Wanderer” places a male figure on a dark beach with scuttling crabs (a guess); shadows make his body seem half white, half brown; the white leg wears an ankle monitor.
Humiliation is especially wrenching in “Presenter,” where we find a female figure with her panties around her ankles. As pointed out by a painter friend I ran into at Petzel, she holds a corded clicker in one hand while standing in a spotlight (lusciously painted red) and seems to pull something — maybe words — from her mouth with her other, much larger, blood-flecked hand. In the black background you can make out the lower edges of three red letters T-E-D, as in TED Talks.
“Mountain Group,” the show’s largest painting, depicts a monumental peak crawling with people, including a man with an orange comb-over who might be Guston. But the scrum also includes four versions of the artist, including one of her lying on her face, weeping, and another who is painting an unpeopled view of mountains while standing in a hole in the ground (she’s starting from behind).
The rest of the show bounces between the personal and the political. The macabre “Washing Monsters” may comment on the challenge of motherhood without resorting to using women or children. In “Beat Out the Sun,” a motley crew of warriors marches on the sun, their torsos overlapping à la Egyptian reliefs, as if beating out the source of all life is the fastest, stupidest way to destroy our planet, if not the solar system.
The strange green-eyed woman in “The Visible World” lies naked on a dark brown rock in the middle of an unquiet sea. She points at the water, which may be rising, and also at a large bird perched on her thigh; the giant raspberry in the bird’s beak may be the last genetically modified fruit on earth. “Touched” would seem to be about #MeToo and women’s anger — at its most wonderfully scary. The female dancer-butterfly phantasm of “Trouble and Appearance,” a nocturne, puts me in mind of the unknown, constantly expanding scope of women’s power and thought, whether or not you agree that the besmirched, wounded salaryman in the background is Donald Trump.
None of this would be too interesting if Schutz’s way with paint, like her way with images and details, were not so engrossing and perplexing, and did not provide so much to work with. Narrative and brushwork tangle and confuse, repel and seduce, often leaving us (or at least me) not sure if what’s going on is completely likable, or should be. Whether this has to do with “Open Casket” or not, she seems to have felt compelled to prove herself again — and she has.
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Event Information:
"Dana Schutz: Imagine You and Me"
Through Feb. 23 at Petzel Gallery, 456 W. 18th St., Manhattan; 212-680-9467, petzel.com.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.