Dana Schutz The Thief, 2026 Oil on canvas 162.6 x 119.4 cm Contemporary Fine Arts | CFA
From 7 November to 19 December 2026, Contemporary Fine Arts (CFA) in Berlin hosts a presentation dedicated to the acclaimed American painter Dana Schutz, bringing her visceral, large-scale canvases into dialogue with a gallery that has championed her practice from the very beginning.
Established in Berlin in 1992, CFA operates out of a two-story nineteenth-century apartment house that pairs a ground-floor white cube storefront with an intimate, salon-style upper level, alongside a Swiss outpost opened in Basel’s Totengässlein in 2023.
Over more than three decades, the gallery has launched the careers of defining contemporary voices such as Cecily Brown, Sarah Lucas, Raymond Pettibon, Dash Snow, and Schutz herself, while representing younger talents—including Maja Ruznic, Emily Mae Smith, Tobias Spichtig, Angelika Loderer, Eliza Douglas, and Travis MacDonald—alongside established masters like Georg Baselitz, Leiko Ikemura, and the estates of Christa Dichgans and Norbert Schwontkowski.
Renowned for museum-caliber programming and scholarly exhibition catalogues, CFA has consistently curated ambitious dialogues across generations of figurative and expressive painting.
Born in Livonia, Michigan in 1976, and now living and working in Brooklyn, Dana Schutz earned her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2000 and her MFA from Columbia University in 2002, where she first forged the inventive narrative language that anchors her oeuvre.
Her exuberant, expressionistic brushwork and luminous palette give form to hypothetical worlds and impossible situations, probing psychological tension, bodily transformation, and storytelling through exaggerated, dynamic compositions.
Dana Schutz Hurt Hand, 2026 Oil on canvas 213.4 x 223.5 cm 84 1/8 x 88 inches Chase Barnes Contemporary Fine Arts | CFA
Schutz initially rose to prominence between 2002 and 2006 with darkly humorous, self-contained mythologies such as Frank as a Proboscis Monkey (2002) and Frank in the Desert (2002), chronicling the fictional existence of Frank, the last man on earth.
Over the following decade, her imagery grew increasingly charged and grotesque, examining cycles of creation, consumption, and absurdity in works like Self-Eater (2004), Face Eater (2004), her visceral Sneeze series, Piano in the Rain (2012), and the claustrophobic, entangled figures of her 2015 Petzel Gallery solo show, Fight in an Elevator.
In recent years, Schutz’s multi-figure compositions have confronted collective anxiety, entrapment, and resilience, as seen in monumental works such as Boat Group (2019) and Treading Water (2019) from her exhibition Imagine Me and You at London’s Thomas Dane Gallery.
Her career has also navigated intense critical discourse—most notably surrounding Open Casket (2016) at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, which sparked widespread debate over representation, cultural appropriation, and artistic responsibility regarding Emmett Till, to which Schutz responded by emphasizing empathy over exploitation.
Recognized early with the Charlotte Street Foundation Fellowship (2002) and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2005), Schutz has been celebrated in major solo exhibitions at the George Economou Collection in Athens (2024), the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (2023), the ICA Boston (2017), MCA Denver (2012), Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (2011), and Shaheen Modern and Contemporary Art in Cleveland (2003).
Her canvases have similarly anchored landmark group surveys at Palazzo Reale in Milan (2025), the Long Museum in Shanghai (2022), the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2022), Whitechapel Gallery in London (2020), the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2019), the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney (2018), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2015, 2017), earning sustained critical attention in The New Yorker, Vulture, and The New York Times.
Dana Schutz The Department, 2026 Oil on canvas Chase Barnes Contemporary Fine Arts | CFA
