Dana Schutz: The Gardener

The Garden of Invinite EndeavorIn 2021, Dana Schutz painted a series of images titled »The Gardener« that were exhibited at CFA in Berlin at the end of the year. Compared with the out-of-print booklet »Waiting for the Barbarians«, which features, among other things, the fiercely criticized painting Open Casket, which provoked angry activist protests during the Whitney Biennial in 2017, the artist now presents a new, modified style of painting. It is her use of a strong black contour line that now exaggerates the expressiveness of her canvases. Whereas her paintings from 2016 seemed startling due to the combination of shocking content and almost sterile form, while making use of a strangely friendly and almost »sunny« color palette in the face of disastrous situations, the new canvases, as well as a series of sculptures also from 2021, leave a rather harsh, forbidding impression. Dana Zaja describes this in her accompanying text, which is well worth reading: »In Schutz s pictorial cosmos, there is something dark at the heart of the most mundane activities, in part because every form of work seems to be a defiant act against the desolate world. Adaptation and resistance tend to go hand in hand here.«