Dana Schutz: Le monde visible

The exhibition presents around forty paintings made over the last twenty years, around twenty drawings and etchings, and six sculptures, including several that have never been shown before.

Dana Schutz is a storyteller, who paints the bonds that unite us, and the barriers that separate us. A virtuoso of colour, she has established a great narrative power over the years, and a flair for dramatic tension revealed in her complex compositions and often very large formats. The exhibition explores themes that pervade her work, through a certain number of fictional scenes: sardonic and exasperating sensations of intimacy, the artist at work, the construction of the self and of society, the tension between individual and group through major crowd scenes, and the description of the intangible. There are also touches of humour in her painting, which is deeply rooted in art historical traditions. Through these representations of the irrepresentable, she evokes the obsolescence of a sick world, the conceit of contemporary mythologies, and above all communication failure between beings.

In her sculpture she grapples with the weight of matter and the composition of forms in space. Alongside this research on volume, she paints increasingly internal projections or mind maps, masses of colourful characters that float in the night, or fight one another to occupy a mountain top. They are the dark reflections of our contemporary world.