Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, I am going to talk about an artist who paints as if the world were collapsing in a fit of hysterical laughter. Dana Schutz is that woman who dares to look our era straight in the eye and paint it in all its monstrous absurdity, transforming our collective anxieties into a disturbing yet exhilarating pictorial carnival.
In her Brooklyn studio, away from prying eyes, she creates monumental canvases where distorted figures, impossible bodies, and situations so unlikely that they become terrifyingly true coexist. Her paintings are like distorting mirrors of our society, reflecting our neuroses with surgical precision, but always tinged with a grim humor. Each brushstroke seems to carry the violence and absurdity of our time, in a macabre dance that both hypnotizes and repulses us.
Let’s take “Jupiter’s Lottery” (2023), her latest exhibition at David Zwirner in New York. The title references a fable by Aesop where Jupiter organizes a lottery for wisdom. When Minerva wins first prize, the mortals, jealous, receive madness as a consolation prize. And they are delighted! This exhibition is a perfect metaphor for our time, where triumphant stupidity parades proudly on social media while the world burns. The canvases that make it up are like so many open windows onto a parallel universe where reason has definitively abdicated its throne.
This is where we must dive into the philosophical concept of “active idiocy” developed by Jean-Yves Jouannais. This notion suggests that stupidity is not simply the absence of intelligence, but a creative force that can become a tool of resistance against the established order. The active idiot is not the one who does not know, but the one who deliberately chooses to know differently, to see the world through a distorting prism that reveals hidden truths. In Schutz’s paintings, the characters seem to embrace their own absurdity with a fierce joy, as if they have discovered in their madness a form of ultimate freedom.
Take “The Gathering” (2023), this gigantic canvas over 6 meters long: a woman is perched on a small wheeled platform, her body twisted like a disarticulated doll, surrounded by a crowd of grimacing spectators. It is our society of spectacle taken to the absurd, where everyone performs their own madness in front of an eager audience. The composition strangely recalls Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People,” but here, liberty has become a circus contortionist, and the people an assembly of voyeurs with faces distorted by unhealthy excitement.
The bodies in her paintings respect no conventional anatomy. They twist, stretch, fragment as if the flesh itself refuses to bend to the laws of physics. This systematic deformation brings us back to the concept of “body without organs” theorized by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. For them, the body without organs is not an empty body, but a body liberated from imposed organizations, pre-established structures. It is a body that refuses the tyranny of biological organization to explore new possibilities of existence. Schutz’s figures are precisely that: bodies in revolt against their own form, against the constraints of traditional representation.
This rebellion against the natural order is particularly expressed in her way of treating flesh. The skin of her characters is never just a simple envelope, but a battlefield where a constant struggle between form and formless takes place. Faces dissolve into masses of color, limbs multiply like in a nightmarish cubist vision, torsos open to reveal impossible interiors. It’s as if Schutz seeks to paint not the appearance of bodies, but their visceral experience of existence.
In “Beat Out the Sun” (2023), a group of men marches in military formation, brandishing boards to go beat the sun. The scene is completely absurd, but isn’t that exactly what we collectively do about climate change? We continue our senseless rituals while the star reminds us that we are slowly roasting. The color palette is explosive: incandescent oranges, electric blues, acid greens that seem to radiate from within the canvas. These colors do not describe the world, they burn it.
The composition of this painting is particularly remarkable in its way of playing with perspective. The figures are arranged like on an Egyptian frieze, but their collective movement creates a diagonal tension that threatens to topple the entire scene. The sun, represented as a burning disk with sharp rays, occupies the center of the composition like an impossible target. It’s an image that perfectly captures the hubris of our time, our absurd belief that we can control the forces of nature.
Schutz’s paintings are populated with creatures that seem to have stepped out of a joyful nightmare. In “The Visible World” (2023), a naked woman lying on a rock in the midst of a stormy sea points to the rising water, while a giant bird perched on her thigh holds in its beak what could be the last genetically modified fruit on Earth. It’s a scene that is both apocalyptic and burlesque, as if Hieronymus Bosch had decided to paint our era obsessed with ecological collapse.
The female figure, with her impossible proportions and improbable pose, evokes classical nudes in the history of art, but seen through the prism of a distorting mirror. Her body is both vulnerable and monstrous, a victim and accomplice of the disaster unfolding around her. The bird, with its mysterious fruit, introduces an allegorical dimension reminiscent of 17th-century vanities, but transposed into our age of genetic manipulation and environmental catastrophe.
Her technique is as explosive as her subjects. The paint is applied in thick layers, creating textures that give the impression that the figures might detach from the canvas at any moment. Brushstrokes are visible, almost violent, as if the very act of painting were a form of hand-to-hand struggle with reality. This excessive materiality of the paint reminds us that we are facing constructed, manufactured objects, and not transparent windows onto the world.
This approach to pictorial matter reveals a deep understanding of the history of modern painting. One can see the influence of American abstract expressionism, but diverted for figurative purposes. The impasto sometimes recalls Willem de Kooning, but where the latter dissolved the figure into the matter, Schutz uses the material to bring forth impossible figures. It’s as if she reverses the process of abstraction, using her techniques to create even more intensely figurative images.
References to the history of art abound in her work, but they are always digested, transformed, rendered unrecognizable. One thinks of Philip Guston, James Ensor, but these influences are like ghosts that haunt her canvases without ever fully possessing them. Schutz creates her own pictorial language, where horror and humor dance a dizzying pas de deux.
This dance is particularly visible in her portraits. In “The Arbiters” (2023), she paints a panel of grotesque judges, their faces warped by expressions that oscillate between self-satisfaction and madness. It’s a scathing critique of those who usurp the right to judge art, society, the lives of others. But it’s also a twisted self-portrait of the artist herself, conscious of her ambiguous position in the world of contemporary art.
The judges are represented as hybrid creatures, half-human, half-monster, their bodies merging with their seats in a disturbing organic confusion. Their expressions are rendered with caricature-like precision that recalls Daumier’s busts, but pushed to a point of distortion where the comic tips into the uncanny. It’s as if Schutz seeks to capture not the appearance of her subjects, but their moral essence, made visible in the form of physical deformation.
For Schutz is not naive. She knows that her paintings circulate in an art market that turns everything into merchandise, even the most radical critique. But instead of wallowing in sterile cynicism, she chooses to push this logic to the absurd. Her paintings are like bombs of color that explode in the viewer’s face, forcing them to recognize their own participation in the collective madness she depicts.
This acute awareness of the institutional context of art is strikingly manifested in her works that stage exhibition or performance situations. In “Presenter” (2023), a figure stands before a podium, her clothes disheveled, while a gigantic hand emerges from the darkness to snatch the words from her mouth. It’s an image that perfectly captures the artist’s anxiety before the expectations of the art world, but also the inherent violence of any act of public presentation.
Violence is, by the way, omnipresent in her work, but it’s a violence transformed into creative energy. In “Sea Group” (2023), one of her bronze sculptures, figures intertwine in a macabre dance, their bodies merging into an organic mass that defies any anatomical logic. It’s as if the material itself rebels against its imposed form, creating new impossible yet strangely alive configurations.
This sculpture marks a new direction in Schutz’s work, proving that her distorting vision can express itself just as powerfully in three dimensions as in two. The figures seem caught in a perpetual movement, as if the bronze itself were still solidifying. It’s a work that perfectly captures the tension between order and chaos that characterizes all of her work.
What makes Schutz’s strength is her ability to maintain a precarious balance between the comic and the tragic, between social critique and pure pictorial enjoyment. Her paintings are like cosmic antics that make us laugh nervously while forcing us to confront the absurdities of our time. She transforms our deepest fears into a carnival spectacle that allows us to face them without sinking into despair.
This transformation is particularly evident in her way of addressing contemporary themes. Whether it’s the climate crisis, genetic manipulation, or the society of spectacle, she approaches these subjects not with the pontifical seriousness of “engaged” art, but with a biting irony that reveals their fundamental absurdity. It’s an approach that recalls the concept of “carnivalesque” developed by Mikhail Bakhtin, where laughter becomes a means of subverting established hierarchies and revealing hidden truths.
In a world where contemporary art often gets lost in disembodied conceptual abstractions or sterilized minimalism, Schutz dares to be maximal, excessive, grotesque. She paints as if her life depended on it, as if each painting were a desperate attempt to give shape to the chaos of our time. Her works do not offer us the comfort of distant contemplation; they pull us into their whirlwind of forms and colors.
Her work does not offer easy solutions, no comforting morality. Instead, it proposes a liberating laughter in the face of the absurdity of our condition. It’s a laughter that resonates like thunder in the artificial sky of contemporary art, reminding us that painting can still be a living, disturbing, and necessary force.
Each of Schutz’s paintings is like a new proposal on how we might see the world if we dared to abandon our certainties. Her distorted figures, impossible spaces, and hallucinatory colors are not escapes into fantasy, but attempts to capture a reality that eludes conventional modes of representation. She shows us that truth may not reside in the accuracy of representation, but in the intensity of experience.
In a world racing toward its demise with a smile on its lips, Dana Schutz is the artist we need: the one who dares to look madness in the face and paint it in all its grotesque glory. She shows us that if we must dance on the volcano, we might as well do it with style and flair, laughing at our own absurdity until the last second. Her paintings are mirrors that reflect back our distorted image, but perhaps more true than the one we usually see. In their very excess, they remind us that art does not have to be wise to be profound, nor serious to speak the truth.
