Dana Schutz - Contemporary Art Day Sale London Sunday, June 29, 2008 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Volume Gallery, New York

  • Catalogue Essay

    Meta-narratives and fictional characters within a complex world of human emotion in a detached reality, American artist Dana Schutz has risen to fame in recent years with successful showings at her respective galleries in New York, Paris and Berlin as well as in Venice for the Biennial in 2005. In Q-Tip Sculptor, Schutz presents the viewer with a solitary figure, a character whose naivety makes us contemplate over their loneliness, the detachment from a subjective and contextual reality but seemingly in stride with a personal creative practice which the being uses as an escape. A girl is composed within a nature that is only identifiable within her mind, partially stupefied by her sculptural skills and resulting with a faceless expression of profound distress. We are perplexed as she is, her emotion reaching out to us and visible in her cartoon like aura. We can hear the music in her headphones and only stare while we try to think of a better way for her to tie her knot across the bamboo branch. What is she trying to make, we ask ourselves.
     This tension between person and environment is what makes the art of Dana Schutz so special. The viewer is never fully conclusive of what the artist presents, each dialogue has its own conclusion but it’s down to the viewer to answer the questions the artist poses in her paintings. In her world the Comic and the Grotesque battle it out for our attention in an invented narrative with an off the wall but solid logic uniquely its own, irrevocably twisted, delightfully comic, strangely real.

571

Q-Tip Sculptor

2002
Oil on canvas.
47 x 49.5 cm. (18 1/2 x 19 1/2 in).
Signed and dated 'Dana Schutz 2002' on the reverse. 

Estimate
£35,000 - 45,000 ‡♠

Contemporary Art Day Sale

30 June 2008, 10am & 2pm
London