Beschreibung:

Dana Schutz Last Man On Earth From Observation 2002 Oil on Canvas. 149 x 137 cm (58 3/4 x 54 in). Signed and dated 'Dana Schutz 2002' on the reverse.
Provenance Ethan Cohen Fine Arts, New York Literature The Triumph of Painting, exh. cat., Saatchi Gallery, London, 2005, p. 203 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay Catapulted to the forefront of the contemporary art scene through seven solo shows in New York, Boston, Paris and Berlin, Dana Schutz belies a confidence beyond her years. Rooted in mythology, her work explores the boundary between form and formlessness, the animate and inanimate. Her paintings depict a fictional world, loosely based on meta-narratives encompassing wit and fantasy. Frank is her protagonist, the last man on earth, whom Schutz depicts through an almost anthropological perspective – lounging in the nude, gazing at the stars or, as in Frank in the Desert, held hostage on a fictional island of the artist’s imagining. Schutz focuses on the dialogue between herself as the artist and her work. She is the creator, the inventor, and architect of her own pictorial landscapes: “Although the paintings themselves are not specifically narrative, I often invent imaginative systems and situations to generate information. These situations usually delineate a site where making is a necessity, audiences potentially don’t exist, objects transcend their function, and reality is malleable.” (Dana Schutz 2004) Frank becomes the means for Schutz to explore the power relationships between artist, subject and viewer. She embarrasses him in sexually aroused situations or, in this example, makes him the victim of bad sunburn. With a symbolist tendency derived from Gauguin and an instinctive Matisse-like palette, Schutz’s paintings are brilliant in their instinctual fabrication, earning her the description in Artforum as “our finest contemporary symbolist”. Read More