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Dana Schutz to present Malloy Visiting Artist Lecture

Painter Dana Schutz, famed for the vigor and shock of her paintings, will deliver this spring?s Malloy Visiting Artist Lecture at 5:30 p.m. Monday, April 21, in Gannett Auditorium, Palamountain Hall. The illustrated talk is free and open to the public.

	How We Cured the Plague, 2007

Schutz?s combination of eye-popping color with startling and sometimes repugnant subject matter has won the attention of the art world. Now in her early 30s, the New York-based artist achieved early fame shortly after earning an M.F.A. degree at Columbia University. Since 2002, her works have appeared in 10 solo shows in New York, Boston, Santa Fe, Berlin, and Paris as well as dozens of group shows across the U.S. and Europe, including the Venice and Prague biennales in 2003, and garnered what look to be hundreds of reviews.

Critically celebrated for works described as zany and surreal, funny and bizarre, lush and repulsive, Schutz?s cartoon-expressionist paintings include one series about auto-cannibals eating their own flesh, and another series that focuses on a burnt-out male specimen named Frank, imagined in various different settings and billed as ?The Last Man on Earth.? An oil portrait called Sneeze depicts its subject in the middle of a particularly explosive example; a large work called How We Cured the Plague (2007) offers a surreal depiction of what might be a hospital ward or plague-research clinic except for the shark in the foreground, birds flying through (dropping feathers), and naked doctors working in open white lab coats. Bomb magazine noted that "dissection and dismemberment abound in Dana Schutz's work, all offset by sunny colors and a pert sense of humor. ?Schutz loves to give her characters life and then cut them up.?

Holland Cotter of The New York Times calls Schutz ?a terrific painter,? describing her gallery shows as ?thematically tight without being programmatic, like a book of poems that reads as one poem. This kind of completeness is hard to achieve.?

The Malloy Visiting Artist Lecture series annually brings to campus a distinguished contemporary artist of international stature. The series is endowed by artist Susan Rabinowitz Malloy, who earned a B.S. in art from Skidmore in1945. Her work has appeared in numerous group and solo shows in New York and Connecticut.

For information, call (518) 580-5030.