Dana Schutz is well known for her vivid gestural paintings depicting imagined and frequently grotesque scenes from parallel worlds. ‘Frank from Observation’, her debut show in 2002–03, proposed a scenario in which Schutz was the last artist on Earth, painting the eponymous ‘Frank’ – its only surviving subject. Whimsical as such schemes may sound, they provide a darkly comic platform from which Schutz explores the absurdity of the human condition. And her work has been taken very seriously indeed, with commissions that include a series based on Wagner’s Götterdämmerung for the Metropolitan Opera.
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