‘The Visible World’ at Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris brings together paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints by the American artist Dana Schutz (1976) spanning the early 2000s until now. Containing over 40 paintings, it functions as both a mini-retrospective and an introduction: it is the first presentation of the artist’s work on this scale in France.
The show tells the story of Schutz’s development as a painter and includes her first work to attract critical attention, Sneeze (2001). This small impasto self-portrait introduces the artist’s signature palette (somewhere between acid and jewel), her flair for painterly fleshiness and her darkly literal, even grotesque, sense of humour. Other works from the early 2000s see her pushing the limits of what is palatable in figurative painting: bodies self-cannibalise, tear themselves apart…
