Schutz pursues a new kind of expressionist painting that is intensely colourful and emotional, but presents itself neither as subjective nor as purely figurative. Her pictures focus on impossible scenarios and grotesque depictions of bodies that exhibit a captivatingly sober approach to painting.

This catalogue shows her latest series of God paintings as well as drawings which explore God as a motif – a pop-cultural figure composed from various mass-media sources. Schutz is not interested in religious worship, but in examining a central, representative problem: What would a god look like without religion?

In addition, also featured are well-known works such as Getting Dressed All at Once (2012) and Shaving (2010), which exaggerate everyday situations into the absurd – sometimes with a curious severity.

Chronological actions are packed into a dense simultaneous structure, and private situations are put on public display. The voyeuristic gaze of the viewer is appealed to and at the same time exposed as such.

Schutz plays with the long tradition of the female nude, whose reinterpretation she places at center of the work through abstraction, thus inevitably offering up a contemporary version of this subject.

This catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition Dana Schutz, at kestnergesellschaft, Hannover, July 25 - October 26, 2014

English and German text.