Dana Schutz and the Body in Contemporary Art: A Critical Exploration of Figuration and Fiction
- Ahmed Kheder
- 6 days ago
- 8 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
Dana Schutz is among the most influential American painters of the 21st century, known for her dynamic, grotesque, and deeply imaginative figurative paintings. Since the early 2000s, her work has played a critical role in the resurgence of narrative figuration. This article offers an in-depth exploration of Schutz’s oeuvre, addressing her technical approach, thematic concerns, and historical significance within contemporary painting. It also considers the critical reception and controversy surrounding her work, particularly the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Ultimately, Schutz’s paintings demonstrate a sustained interrogation of the human body, narrative invention, and painterly expression in a post-photographic world.
Dana Schutz (b. 1976, Livonia, Michigan) emerged in the early 2000s as a distinctive voice in contemporary art. Her imaginative figurative works—often marked by visceral, distorted bodies and absurd narratives—have attracted both critical acclaim and scrutiny. Schutz’s ability to engage with painting’s historical weight while pushing its possibilities into speculative fiction situates her uniquely within the lineage of modern and postmodern figuration. Her paintings are as much about the act of painting itself as they are about the complex, often monstrous human condition they depict.
A Critical Exploration of The Art of Dana Schutz
Technique and Materiality
At the core of Schutz’s work is her virtuosity with oil paint. Her surfaces are dense, materially rich, and highly worked. Schutz often applies pigment in thick impastos, builds textures with gestural marks, and uses vibrant, often jarring color palettes to animate her characters. She embraces the tension between flatness and illusionism, creating visual spaces that oscillate between depth and the assertive physicality of paint on canvas.
Schutz’s brushwork is expressive and highly controlled, evoking both the energy of Abstract Expressionism and the figurative distortion of German Expressionism.
Her paintings are not concerned with verisimilitude but rather with imaginative reconstructions of reality. Schutz’s technical dexterity allows her to invent scenes in which the body is unraveled, reshaped, or imploded—narratives that are as much about formal exploration as conceptual inquiry.
Themes and Narratives
Fictional Constructs and Narrative Worlds
Schutz frequently builds fictional universes populated by surreal characters: people who eat themselves (Self-Eaters, 2003), figures engaged in absurd tasks (Swimming, Smoking, Crying, 2009), or post-apocalyptic survivors (Presentation, 2005). These invented worlds function as metaphorical frameworks for psychological states, artistic creation, and bodily mutation.
Her early series Frank from Observation (2002) tells the story of the last man on Earth, “Frank,” painted from imagination rather than observation. This narrative conceit allowed Schutz to explore the limits of representation and empathy, turning the canvas into a theater of projection and speculation.
The Body and Transformation
The human body in Schutz’s work is elastic, exaggerated, and frequently grotesque. She stretches limbs, distorts features, and subjects figures to strange rituals or physical calamities. This corporeal mutability reflects broader questions about identity, embodiment, and the instability of the self.
Her approach often recalls artists like Francis Bacon, Max Beckmann, or Philip Guston—painters for whom the body was a site of existential drama. However, Schutz’s figures are also embedded in contemporary anxieties: gender, performance, artificiality, and post-human evolution.
Art and Process as Subject
Several of Schutz’s paintings are meta-pictorial, representing the act of painting itself. Works like Building the Boat While Sailing (2012) or Painter (2010) dramatize the physical and conceptual labor of artistic creation. These images reflect the absurdity, futility, and compulsive necessity of making art in the 21st century.
Stylistic Evolution
Schutz’s style has evolved markedly over two decades. Her early 2000s work was marked by flat, bright colors, cartoony abstraction, and whimsical grotesquery. By the 2010s, her palette darkened, compositions became more structured, and figuration turned more monumental. Her 2016 solo exhibition Fight in an Elevator at the Petzel Gallery marked a shift toward larger, more complex multi-figure scenes with compositional density reminiscent of Renaissance and Baroque battle paintings.
Post-2017, her work has grown increasingly introspective and allegorical. In Imagine You Are a Viewer (2018) and The Visible World (2022), Schutz turns toward themes of spectatorship, confinement, and media. The handling of space becomes tighter, with compressed interiors and ambiguous architectures encasing the figures.
Controversy: Open Casket and Ethical Representation
Schutz’s 2016 painting Open Casket, exhibited at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, sparked intense debate. The painting depicted the disfigured body of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old African American boy brutally lynched in 1955. Critics argued that Schutz, as a white artist, had appropriated Black suffering and historical trauma. Calls for the painting’s removal—and even destruction—provoked broader discourse on authorship, representation, and the responsibilities of artists.
Defenders pointed to Schutz’s long-standing engagement with difficult subject matter and her stated intention to grapple with grief and empathy. Others viewed the controversy as a reckoning with systemic exclusions in the art world, where Black voices and artists remain underrepresented. The episode remains one of the most contentious in recent art history, emblematic of fraught conversations around race, privilege, and artistic freedom.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Despite, or because of, the debates surrounding her work, Dana Schutz remains a vital figure in contemporary painting. Her inclusion in major museum collections—the MoMA, Whitney, and the Guggenheim, among others—signals her institutional relevance. Critics like Roberta Smith have praised her inventiveness and fearless approach to difficult subjects, while others continue to question the ethical implications of her imagery.
Schutz has been a significant force in the revival of large-scale narrative figuration in the 21st century, influencing a younger generation of painters who similarly embrace the body, narrative, and psychological intensity. Her work suggests that painting, far from being obsolete in the digital era, can still serve as a site for imaginative disruption and moral inquiry.
Dana Schutz is widely recognized for her bold, expressionistic style and grotesque, often absurd subject matter. While her work has received significant acclaim and institutional endorsement, it has also sparked sharp controversy and criticism—both aesthetically and ethically. In this critique, we examine Schutz’s work from formal, conceptual, and socio-political perspectives, with a particular focus on weaknesses in her painterly approach, problematic content choices, and the broader cultural ramifications of her practice.
The most negative critique of Schutz’s work emerged in response to her 2016 painting Open Casket, which depicted the mutilated body of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Black boy who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955. The painting—shown at the Whitney Biennial—was widely condemned for its racial insensitivity and the ethical implications of a white artist representing Black suffering. Critics argued that Schutz, as a white woman, exploited a real and unresolved historical trauma that she neither experienced nor inherited.
A Balanced Critique of Dana Schutz's Painting Practices
Visual Impact
The artist's ability to create a visually arresting painting is the foundation of influencing emotions and delivering conceptual determinations to the viewers.
One of the visual aspects that any visual artist is keen on is the painting composition. A composition of a painting is determined by how the artist utilizes space, arrange subject matter, and embed philosophical symbols in the painting canvas. Creating a strong visually impactful composition is a labor-intensive process that requires significant planning.
At first glance, Shutz's compositions are tight, consistent, and visually arresting. However, after the first impression the viewer starts to visually analyze the painting and due to the weak narrative the viewer would get a weak, faded, and anemic steady state of emotional interaction with the painting.
At the same time, Shutz's compositions seem to be built to utilize space consistently without giving sufficient attention to detail. Shutz's compositions may be coherent but still don't have the ability to hold the viewer's eyes for the retention time required to convey any philosophical messages in the hearts.
Yes, Shutz's created artistic non-photographic compositions. However, still fade compositions. May be it needs more interaction between the subject matter or to sophisticate her compositions with a dynamic perspective rather than focusing on flat creations.
Another essential visual aspect is the color palette. Artists must put lots of effort to make effective choices from the color wheel that maximize the visual impact of their artistic explorations. While creating photorealistic paintings requires achieving realistic tones, creating a visually pleasing artistic experiment requires the utilization of a wide range of realistic and unrealistic hues.
To sustain a considerable retinal pleasure the artist must consider carefully toggling between vibrant tones achieved, without the addition of white pigments, exclusively by mixing Basic Yellow, Blue, Red pigments and more muted greenish, muddy, and greyish tones.
Also, Easy to achieve color tones are a weak point from an artistic point of view. As an artist you should put an effort to add to the pigments coming out of the painting tube.
Upon initial observation, Shutz's color palette still needs much effort to reach any artistic level. Her hues are stagnant, simple, and easy to achieve. It neither achieves photorealistic nor artistic goals. Her paintings show a wide areas of muddy, unsaturated color tones that take from the painting rather than adding to it.
Another visual element to consider while the process of paintings' evaluation is light transitions.
Light, as it interacts with tints and shades, is indeed the most visually appealing element in any artistic exploration. Adjusting light transitions brings paintings from nonexistence to life.
In the late 19th century, Post-impressionists' trials to override the critical role of light transitions in their paintings have often led to success. Also during the 20th century, many expressive painting trials exploring flat-light transitions, carried out by Primitivism forerunners and Neo Expressionists, succeeded in developing painting styles that achieved a strong impact in the art world.
However, what was groundbreaking before is now a typical representation of underdeveloped canvases. In the 21st century, the viewer's attention is much more difficult to acquire and creating a strong impactful painting requires professional use of light transitions.
In the initial viewing, Shutz's paintings are built without a true artistic consideration of the role of light transitions. She tends to embed wide flat areas in her paintings and that is a recipe for disengaging the viewer.
Conceptual Framework
The first layer in creating a painting is to define its philosophical and conceptual dimensions. The artist must clarify the message before assembling the visual elements that will convey it.
For example, Hilma Af Klint started abstraction while she was trying to represent the theosophical doctrine she followed in a unique and original style—'original' here meaning the first unveiling. Also, Jackson Pollock represented Nihilistic philosophy by practicing a painting style that is by practicing a painting style that is ultimately liberated from value.
However, the drip painting techniques introduced by Jackson Pollock to reflect Nihilism will always be associated with Nihilism and cannot be used to represent other philosophies. While an artist may express the same philosophical ideas through different painting styles, each painting style would always be associated with only one philosophy.
That's why it is difficult for artists to develop a characteristic style that combines strong visual impact with a meaningful conceptual depth.
Trying to explore her conceptual determinations, Schutz often traffics in imaginary scenarios expressed through absurd, humorous, and sometimes grotesque figurative representations which are supposed to engage with existential or psychological states. Yet these expressive narratives frequently lack philosophical specificity or theoretical depth. The early 20th-century Primitivist style she is utilizing to introduce her subjects, whether depicting people eating themselves or undergoing bizarre surgeries, relies on shock value rather than conceptual clarity.
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