David Schutter,
2017

David Schutter’s practice is a form of phenomenological study that discusses the distances and problems encountered when making a painting. His works are as much performative re-enactments of specific canonical sources as they are discreet paintings and drawings, and as such form a painter’s repertory of extended rehearsals. These investigations are not homage, but instead a way toward understanding continued expectations that paintings function along historical values. In his approach to his subjects, Schutter locates his practice within the traditions of philosophical inquiry by beginning with the surfaces of things. His questions elicit responses to how we re-stratify our knowledge of the past while developing representations of the present, how we can uncover circumscribed categories and make new knowledge from the experience, and how repeated questions come to be ultimately forms of description in a world where the past is often a difficult and arguable anteriority.

David Schutter has had solo exhibitions at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Gemäldegalerie Berlin, Germany; the National Gallery of Modern Art, Scotland; and with Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; Tony Wight Gallery, Chicago; and Aurel Scheibler, Berlin, Germany. Public collections include the Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Gemäldegalerie Berlin, Germany; and the National Gallery of Modern Art, Scotland. His projects and research have been supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Illinois Arts Council. Schutter received his MFA from the University of Chicago and completed his undergraduate studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia.

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