In this episode, host David Humphrey interviews New York painter Dana Schutz about her creative process and how her paintings are grounded in fictional logic. They discuss how Dana's paintings are fictions, not narratives, and how the question "what if" generates subject matter until the paintings transform it to, 'it is.' They also talk about the comic dimension in her paintings and the absence of death in her work, as if they are frozen. Dana shares a live performance in Amsterdam she listens to while painting: David Thomas and Two Pale Boys' song "Surfer Girl." She also shares a demented song by Rod Keith called 'Ecstasy to Frenzy,' an American song poem anthology where ordinary people send in their lyrics and they set it to music.
Dana Schutz (b. 1976, MI) is known for formally inventive canvases that combine figuration and abstraction to construct complex visual narratives that engage the capacity of painting to represent subjective experience.
Image: Fight in an Elevator, 2015. Courtesy of David Zwirner.
