David Schutter’s practice is a form of phenomenological study that engages the distances and problems encountered when making a painting. His works are performative reenactments of specific Western canonical sources as much as they are discrete paintings and drawings and, as such, form a painter’s repertory of extended rehearsals. These investigations are not an homage to the “old masters” or copies, but instead a way toward understanding continued expectations that paintings function along historical values in a world where the past is a difficult and arguable anteriority. Schutter’s series of silkscreen diptychs, titled DP P 587 588 PR(2018), is based on the two eponymous paintings exhibited by the artist at the Neue Galerie in Kassel as part of documenta 14, paintings which themselves were the result of Schutter’s intensive observations of two paintings by the early Renaissance painter Bernardo Parentino in the collection of the Doria Pamphilj, Rome. The process of multiple transfers, both conceptually and formally, reflects Schutter’s exploration of what are considered preliminary stages of painting, such as studies or études used to aid in creating a final work. This diptych print is rather an étude made after the completion of the paintings as a way to extend the life of the work and flout the idea of reproduction as fidelity to experience. As Schutter’s quasi gray paintings are notoriously difficult to photograph, he here authors the photographic reproduction of the work through the distortions of high contrast and separation found in the raster effects of silkscreen printing techniques, a gesture further estranging any appraisals of origin in a print edition that nullifies simple reductions.

David Schutter (*1974 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, lives and works in Berlin) has participated in numerous international exhibitions, including at Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, Chicago (2019); Aïshti Foundation, Antelias / Lebanon (2019); documenta 14, Athens and Kassel (2017); National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2009); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2007); Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (2006). Since 2020, he has been a Professor of Fine Art at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. Previously, he served as an associate professor at the University of Chicago’s Department of Visual Arts, a position he held since 2006. In 2020, he received the Berlin Art Prize in the visual arts category.