DAVID SCHUTTER’s (b. 1974, Pennsylvania) 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 surface of things. His questions elicit responses to how we re-categorize our knowledge of the past while developing re-presentations 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 received his MFA at the University of Chicago in 2003 and completed his undergraduate studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1996. Schutter has exhibited at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Gemäldegalerie Berlin, Germany; the National Gallery of Modern Art, Scotland; the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, Chicago; and in 2015 Schutter received the honorable Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome.
