Dana Schutz at Musée d’Art Moderne

‘The Visible World’ at Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris brings together paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints by the American artist Dana Schutz (1976) spanning the early 2000s until now. Containing over 40 paintings, it functions as both a mini-retrospective and an introduction: it is the first presentation of the artist’s work on this scale in France.

The show tells the story of Schutz’s development as a painter and includes her first work to attract critical attention, Sneeze (2001). This small impasto self-portrait introduces the artist’s signature palette (somewhere between acid and jewel), her flair for painterly fleshiness and her darkly literal, even grotesque, sense of humour. Other works from the early 2000s see her pushing the limits of what is palatable in figurative painting: bodies self-cannibalise, tear themselves apart, burn. The (anti-)narrative strategies vary. Sometimes the artist sets herself queasy painting challenges, such as in the series Face-Eaters (2004) or with the visceral multitasking puzzle Swimming, Smoking, Crying (2009).

Schutz also draws her subject matter from geopolitical events; Men’s Retreat (2005) features blindfolded members of the Bush cabinet in a bucolic setting. During this phase the painting style becomes jazzy, with zones of dense pattern. Bodies are at the mercy of the painting, which chews them up and hacks them apart. If there is a theme, it could be the grim comedy of trying to live in a deathful world.

In Schutz’s paintings from 2018 onwards, there is a turn away from the chromatic delirium and noisy surfaces of previous works. Gone too are any references to current events, and the convoluted anti-narrative logic used previously to spin out compositions. The approach is simplified: groups of thickly-painted figures occupy dark, apocalyptic scenes. Toppling over each other, the figures wave, point, grasp; sometimes they throw stones, wrestle or paint. Many of these works inhabit a Philip Guston-like allegorical space. The protagonist of the painting The Visible World (2018) accuses the viewer with a Gorgon stare of glowing green traffic light eyes.

In more recent works, rudimentary motifs such as a trash heap, a mountain, or a wall become the stage for groups of entangled semi-monstrous figures. These weird, corpulent beings recall the dynamism of Jacqueline de Jong’s animal-human hybrids; they strain at the limits of musculature, their thick paint a vehicle for material play. The treatment is super-impasto and the scale is enormous: some paintings, such as the six-metre-long The Wheel (2022), fill entire walls. Boat Group (2020) is rendered with massive brushes, an effect that amplifies its churning, stormy atmosphere and velvety darkness.

With the reduction in aesthetic wizardry, Schutz’s paintings after 2017 have become more spacious, more open to interpretation yet more direct in their messaging. The explicit, dark tone and apocalyptic atmosphere more pointedly allude to the theme of normalised violence that the artist expressed in earlier paintings via more convoluted narrative means. Their immersive qualities and thrilling materiality still guarantee a visceral impact but with an emotional forcefulness that multiplies the entry points. The viewer is given space to enter these epic works — an entire universe made of bodies of paint.

Does the darkness and clarity of the recent paintings indicate Schutz’s internalisation of the critique and public shaming of 2017? The works in the show address the viewer directly, in a raw, ragged manner. They speak to the dark times of the present and the darker times ahead, of survival, of the pleasure and the ambivalence of being-together. The crowd has the potential to be a mob, a pile of limbs, a community — and all those things at once.

Artists make mistakes. So do curators and institutions. They are accountable for them. In the exhibition ‘The Visible World’, it is for the viewer to decide whether these paintings themselves form an accounting.