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A maelstrom of vibrant color and fractured form, Swiss Family Traveling, 2015, exemplifies Dana Schutz’s painterly breakdown of space and volume. Flailing limbs, flushed faces, and contorted figures command the composition as Schutz’s neo-Cubist brushwork fragments objects and bodies into bold geometric planes. The result is a clenched composition that teems with all of the anticipatory stress of family holiday travel, offset by a sun-drenched palette and lively sense of humor. Structuring the chaos with crystalline painterly logic, Schutz depicts a quotidian but decontextualized scene rendered slightly strange as she conjures a vision of reality that has an element of the theater of the absurd about it.
Home Alone, 1990 Combining vivid figuration with jarring asymmetric geometries, Swiss Family Traveling epitomizes the fragmented style through which Schutz captures the complexities of human experience. Schutz positions a stylishly attired family within a storm of visual tumult as she arranges the jagged planes of vibrant color; the competing passages of hue and texture warp together, isolating each family member and pressing them deeper into the churning frenzy. The intense structure of the composition imparts a stressful, claustrophobic effect, recalling the oversaturated multitudes and feverish overstimulation of destinations like the Champs-Elysées and Times Square. Compressed under this immense pressure, Swiss Family Traveling shatters into discordant planes of visceral color, establishing a vibrating dissonance that imbues the work with hectic dynamism. Schutz reprises the pioneering effects of synthetic cubism to create the multicolored scramble of competing planes that exaggerates the tensions conveyed; the result is a scattered delirium that buzzes with uneasy emotion, marrying form and function to dizzying effect.
"I embrace the area between which the subject is composed and decomposing, formed and formless, inanimate and alive."
—Dana Schutz
Kazimir Malevich, The Knife Grinder, or Principle of Glittering, 1912–1913. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven Swiss Family Traveling exemplifies Schutz’s construction of absurd imagined situations, creating melancholy musings of contemporary life. Isolated from its sources and contorted to jarring effect, Swiss Family Traveling offers dissociated looks at a recognizable scenario cut off from all narrative and context; Schutz has commented that while her “paintings themselves are not specifically narrative, I often invent imaginative systems and situations to generate information. These situations usually delineate a site where…objects transcend their function and reality is malleable.”i The resultant artwork is accentuated by its metaphysical strangeness as the artist depicts a scene that is simultaneously grounded in the everyday and in the imagination.
Swiss Family Traveling is part of a series featured in Schutz’s sophomore exhibition at Petzel Gallery, Fight in an Elevator. As the exhibition’s title suggests, Schutz places her figures within compressed spaces where they are forced to struggle against their painted environments. The characters find themselves in helpless and perplexing situations in foreign and absurd settings; these highly structured spaces, which are both intensely public and utterly private, exemplify Schutz’s engagement with the subject of interiority. Rather than offering a voyeuristic view of the scene, her frontal facing subjects stare directly back at the viewer, seemingly with the desire to extend outside of themselves. Schutz’s characters work a double agenda: while embroiled in their semi-private interiors, they are active participants in the viewer’s encounter with the painting.
Pablo Picasso, Weeping Woman, 1937. The Tate, London, Artwork: © 2021 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York At the core of Schutz’s painting and paramount to Swiss Family Traveling is an abiding interest in the ways we express emotion. The wincing, confused, and frustrated expressions of the eponymous troupe, cherry red contortions at their most embellished, imbue the figures with a distressed psychological weight that radiates from the composition. The artist David Salle remarked has on this aspect of Schutz’s work, saying that her paintings “have the look of feelings made external.”ii Swiss Family Traveling renders experiences familiar to most viewers—namely the dissonant gnawing of familial ties exacerbated by the frustrations of travel—as grotesque caricatures of real life, appropriating everyday emotion as the ultimate exaggeration of itself, and thus rendering it foreign and immediate. Schutz, in consummate Brechtian form, materializes emotion in painting and presents the viewer with absurd reflections of real life.
i Dana Schutz, quoted in Painting 2004: Group Exhibition, press release, Victoria Miro, London, 2004.
ii David Salle, “Dana Schutz,” Artforum, vol. 50, no. 4, December 2011, p. 247.Provenance
Petzel, New York
Acquired from the above by the present ownerExhibited
New York, Petzel, Dana Schutz: Fight in an Elevator, September 10 – October 24, 2015
Literature
Michael Lieberman, “Dana Schutz at Petzel Gallery, NYC,” The Art Blog, September 22, 2015, online (illustrated)
Kyle Chayka, “A Painter for Our Absurd Age of Pop Culture,” The New Republic, September 2015, online
Kate Liebman, “DANA SCHUTZ Fight in an Elevator,” Brooklyn Rail, October 5, 2015, online
Julia Felsenthal, “Artsplainer: Dana Schutz’s Paintings in New York and Montreal,” Vogue, October 19, 2015, online
“‘What if People Could Eat Themselves?’: Dana Schutz on her Macabre Paintings, in 2007,” ARTnews, October 23, 2016, online (illustrated)
Property from a Distinguished New York Collection
Ο◆45
Swiss Family Traveling
signed and dated "Dana Schutz 2015" on the reverse
oil on canvas
84 x 88 in. (213.4 x 223.5 cm)
Painted in 2015.
Estimate
$1,200,000 - 1,800,000
Sold for $1,482,000
Amanda Lo Iacono
Head of Auctions
New York
+1 212 940 1278
20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale
New York Auction 23 June 2021
1
Cinga Samson
Two piece 1
Estimate $25,000 - 35,000
Sold for $378,000
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2
Jadé Fadojutimi
Untitled
Estimate $40,000 - 60,000
Sold for $390,600
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3
Salman Toor
Fort Greene
Estimate $100,000 - 150,000
Sold for $478,800
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4
Avery Singer
Untitled
Estimate $1,200,000 - 1,800,000
Sold for $4,144,000
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5
Matthew Wong
The Reader
Estimate $600,000 - 800,000
Sold for $2,329,000
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6
Winston Churchill
The Moat, Breccles
Estimate $1,500,000 - 2,000,000
Sold for $1,845,000
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7
Matthew Wong
Field in a Dream
Estimate $1,500,000 - 2,000,000
Sold for $2,934,000
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8
Jean Dubuffet
L'homme à la toque
Estimate $2,000,000 - 3,000,000
Sold for $2,571,000
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9
Emily Mae Smith
Waiting Room
Estimate $40,000 - 60,000
Sold for $756,000
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10
Nicole Eisenman
Whatever Guy
Estimate $600,000 - 800,000
Sold for $840,700
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11
Norman Lewis
Abstract City
Estimate $800,000 - 1,200,000
Sold for $1,119,000
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12
Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol
Bananas
Estimate $4,000,000 - 6,000,000
Sold for $4,300,000
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13
David Hockney
A Neat Lawn
Estimate $9,500,000 - 10,500,000
Sold for $11,000,000
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14
Vija Celmins
Untitled (Ocean)
Estimate $5,500,000 - 6,500,000
Sold for $7,748,000
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15
Carmen Herrera
Green and Orange
Estimate $2,000,000 - 3,000,000
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16
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17
Brice Marden
Elements III
Estimate $3,200,000 - 3,800,000
Sold for $5,233,000
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18
Amoako Boafo
Untitled
Estimate $80,000 - 120,000
Sold for $655,200
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19
Titus Kaphar
Untitled III
Estimate $300,000 - 400,000
Sold for $1,058,500
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20
Amy Sherald
It Made Sense...Mostly In Her Mind
Estimate $500,000 - 700,000
Sold for $3,539,000
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21
Wayne Thiebaud
Winding River
Estimate $6,000,000 - 8,000,000
Sold for $9,809,000
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22
Mark Rothko
Untitled
Estimate $3,500,000 - 4,500,000
Sold for $3,700,000
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23
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Batman
Estimate $1,600,000 - 2,000,000
Sold for $1,800,000
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24
Keith Haring
Untitled (For John Sex)
Estimate $800,000 - 1,200,000
Sold for $899,000
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25
Takashi Murakami
Red Demon and Blue Demon with 48 Arhats
Estimate $3,500,000 - 4,500,000
Sold for $6,080,000
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26
Gerhard Richter
Abstraktes Bild (940-2)
Estimate $4,500,000 - 5,500,000
Sold for $5,112,000
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27
Joan Mitchell
Untitled
Estimate $2,500,000 - 3,500,000
Sold for $3,902,000
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28
Willem de Kooning
East Hampton V
Estimate $700,000 - 1,000,000
Sold for $3,055,000
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29
Amy Sillman
Flower Giver
Estimate $300,000 - 400,000
Sold for $598,500
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30
Alexander Calder
Fourteen Black Leaves
Estimate $2,000,000 - 3,000,000
Sold for $2,300,000
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31
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32
Julie Curtiss
Three Widows
Estimate $110,000 - 150,000
Sold for $466,200
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33
Norman Rockwell
My Mother (Soldier with French Woman)
Estimate $350,000 - 500,000
Sold for $504,000
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34
Richard Prince
Nurses Dormitory #3
Estimate $800,000 - 1,200,000
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35
Mickalene Thomas
Portrait of Jessica
Estimate $200,000 - 300,000
Sold for $1,542,500
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36
Andy Warhol
Mao
Estimate $3,500,000 - 4,500,000
Sold for $3,000,000
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37
Georg Baselitz
Drei Herzen (Three Hearts)
Estimate $2,500,000 - 3,500,000
Sold for $2,450,000
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38
Carl Andre
36 Copper Square
Estimate $2,500,000 - 3,500,000
Sold for $2,692,000
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39
Robert Rauschenberg
Untitled (Elemental Sculpture)
Estimate $250,000 - 350,000
Sold for $315,000
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40
Bruce Nauman
Musical Chair
Estimate $1,000,000 - 1,500,000
Sold for $1,482,000
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41
David Hammons
It’s Not Necessary
Estimate $800,000 - 1,200,000
Sold for $5,475,000
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42
Andy Warhol
Shadow (Double)
Estimate $800,000 - 1,200,000
Sold for $877,000
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43
Toyin Ojih Odutola
Quality Control
Estimate $150,000 - 200,000
Sold for $340,200
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44
Robert Colescott
Gift of the Sea
Estimate $300,000 - 500,000
Sold for $504,000
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45
Dana Schutz
Swiss Family Traveling
Estimate $1,200,000 - 1,800,000
Sold for $1,482,000
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46
Banksy
Love Is In The Air
Estimate $1,000,000 - 2,000,000
Sold for $1,179,500
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47
Keith Haring
Untitled
Estimate $1,000,000 - 1,500,000
Sold for $1,482,000
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48
Louise Bourgeois
Labyrinthine Tower
Estimate $550,000 - 750,000
Sold for $756,000
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49
Paul McCarthy
White Snow Dwarf (Doc)
Estimate $400,000 - 600,000
Sold for $403,200
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50No Reserve
Jeff Koons
Gazing Ball (Demeter)
Estimate $400,000 - 600,000 •
Sold for $998,000
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