Albino

Dana Schutz’s portrait of an albino woman glows with virtuosity, the subject’s skin and hair given a yellow chill against the bluish background; a black turtleneck further heightens her striking pallor. Her winsome expression is conveyed through a bare minimum of strokes in thick oil paint. As evocative of Renaissance portraiture as the work of Marlene Dumas, Schutz’s sidestepping of traditional beauty lends the work a dreamlike edge that hints at an alternative painterly universe. ‘My paintings are loosely based on metanarratives,’ Schutz says. ‘The pictures float in and out of pictorial genres. Still lifes become personified, portraits become events and landscapes become constructions. I embrace the area between which the subject is composed and decomposing, formed and formless, inanimate and alive. Recently I have been making paintings of sculptural goddesses, transitory still lifes, people who make things, people who are made and people who have the ability to eat themselves. 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.’