No work in Brooklyn-based painter Dana Schutz's first three exhibitions could have prepared viewers for Presentation (2005), which was first exhibited earlier this year in "Greater New York 2005" at P.S. 1. (It is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, and the museum was so eager to exhibit it in the permanent collection galleries that they removed it from the walls of their outer-borough affiliate several weeks before the end of the exhibition.) The painting was, to my mind, one of the best works in the exhibition, nearly unmatched in its ambition. Beyond scale—at approximately ten by fourteen feet, it was the largest work Schutz had created to date—it was also the most complicated canvas she had ever attempted.

Her first solo show, "Frank From Observation," was held just three years ago. Frank, who looked surprisingly like the comedian Chris Elliott with a sunburn and long, stringy hair, was described by the artist as the last name on Earth—a fact that made him "the last subject" and her "the last painter." This construct allowed her to paint pretty much anything she wanted: Frank as a Proboscis Monkey (2002); Frank as a Reclining Nude (2002); even images in which her companion doesn't appear at all. Her freedom came from the pair's isolation: no one else could doubt the veracity of what she depicted; the imagined world was complete with two inhabitants.

The majority of the canvases in "Self-Eaters and the People Who Love Them" and "Panic," her next two solo exhibitions, depicted individual "self-eaters," humanlike creatures that find nourishment by ingesting their own body parts (which they then regenerate), who seem to be citizens of an unseen community that one can imagine inhabiting a deserted island or remote jungle. In these mostly easel-scale paintings, which often teeter on the thin line between representation and abstraction, Schutz's imagined world boasted a greater population if not yet the greater complexity (social and, for that matter, compositional) inherent to depicting human interaction.

As if Schutz had spun a top and set these lives in motion, her paintings during this time depicted small but ever-widening circles of activity, and the contours of her world began to show. But recalling the title of Schutz's first exhibition, we are reminded that her works are imagined but paradoxically also observed. Even when she comprised one-half of the imagined world's population, a quasi-clinical remove allowed us to believe she was looking at this fictional place through a screen or window, coolly contemplating the scenes before her. As the critic Jed Perl wrote recently of the lesser-known American painter Mary Lyons, Schutz's works were "a realist account of surrealist possibility." (1)

Whereas the works in "Self-Eaters" and "Panic" depict individuals or small groups of people in acid hues, Presentation includes a teeming mass of faces worthy of comparison to James Ensor's Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889 (1888). These people, ostensibly the self-eaters whose self-sufficiency had previously kept them apart, sport the grave looks of those summoned for an important declaration; "Panic" indeed.

Before them lies a mutant body, bones broken and limbs ripped asunder, on a simple examination table (constructed from a slab of wood) that hovers over a similarly sized hole in the ground. In the front row of the crowd, nestled close to the edge of this table, ruddy-faced congregants stare, whisper among themselves, and cover their noses and mouths. One woman, in what looks like surgeon's scrubs and gloves, slices into an elephantine hand held up by a rudimentary sling; it is twice as large as her head.

The chimera's eyes are open: Is this a biopsy or an autopsy? Is this examination the precursor to a burial? Or is it an exhumation? The figure appears to have an intravenous tube emerging from its left arm, but it is not hooked up to any equipment or medicine, and beyond that the painting's details are ambiguous. What has happened such that everyone, previously enjoying idyllic seclusion as they fashioned new body parts for themselves, has congregated here? The difference in size between members of the crowd and the object of their undivided attention is notable. Perhaps this limp figure, created from a thicket of yellow, orange, pink, and red brushstrokes, is a foreign visitor, ˆ la Lemuel Gulliver in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.

Article continues: Next page