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 discrete 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 Gemäldegalerie, Berlin; the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica, Palazzo Poli, Rome; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; with Aurel Scheibler, Berlin; Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; and Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Le Magasin, Centre National Art d’ Contemporain, Grenoble; the David Roberts Art Foundation, London; Fondazione Memmo, Rome; the American Academy in Rome; the Frans Hals Museum and De Hallen, Haarlem; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the 5th Glasgow International Biennial; and Documenta 14. Schutter is the recipient of a 2018 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and a 2015 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome; he is a German Chancellor's Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and a Fulbright Scholar.
Selected Publications
The Escape, drawings and text by David Schutter with essays by Dieter Roelstraete and Barry Schwabsky, published by the University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2020
"SK L 402-429, 432-439," a portfolio of drawings with a text by Adam Szymczyk, in Portable Gray, Number 3, published by the University of Chicago Press, 2019
"The Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection: The Gravitational Pull of Susan Stewart’s 1984 Literary Classic," Judith Stein, in Ursula Magazine, published by Hauser & Wirth, Issue 2, Spring 2019
"David Schutter in Conversation with André Butzer," in Turps Banana, UK, Issue 20, Autumn, 2018
"Toward Understanding the Nature of History and its Limitations: An Interview with American Artist, David Schutter," Christian Mieves, in Journal of Contemporary Painting, UK, Volume 4, Issue 2, October 2018
"The Process: In Which an Artist Discusses Making a Particular Work," interview by Jude Stewart, in The Believer, October/November 2018
Documenta 14: Daybook, editors Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk, published by Prestel, New York, 2017
Reluctance to Reveal: A Conversation with David Schutter, interview by Jurriaan Benschop, booklet published by Aurel Scheibler, Berlin, 2017
Spolia, drawings by David Schutter, published by Aurel Scheibler, Berlin & Istituto Centrale per la Grafica, Rome, 2016
"David Schutter: The Lingua Franca of Painterliness," Josephine Halverson, in Afterall, Fall 2014
The Way of the Shovel: On the Archeological Imaginary in Art, Dieter Roelstraete, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2013
"Rendition," Monika Szewczyk, poster and essay published by Logan Center Exhibitions, Chicago, 2013