FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

DAVID SCHUTTER Joseph and Potipher's Wife
(click here for images)

March 1 – April 21, 2007
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 1st from 5 pm - 8 pm
Gallery Hours: WEDNESDAY- Saturday 11 am - 5 pm
TONY WIGHT / BODYBUILDER & SPORTSMAN Gallery
119 N. Peoria St. Chicago IL 60607
T. 312-492-7261 F.312-492-6796 info@bodybuilderandsportsman.com
Contact: Tony Wight
Press and photographic material available upon request.

TONY WIGHT / BODYBUILDER & SPORTSMAN Gallery is pleased to announce Joseph and Potiphor’s Wife, an exhibition of painting and drawing by Chicago-based artist David Schutter. This is his second solo show at Tony Wight / Bodybuilder & Sportsman Gallery.

David Schutter’s exhibition consists of a single painting and twenty drawings on vellum developed during the painting’s process. The subject of each component is the painting Joseph and Potiphor’s Wife by 17th Century Dutch Master, Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669). Schutter’s painting, the same scale and material as the original Dutch work, is an attempt to re-make the original painting through memory. Not copies, these works are each a gesture towards understanding the nature of history and its limitations while it is also simultaneously a reinvestment in the strange object-hood of paintings. A concurrent solo exhibition of Schutter’s paintings made through the same process will be on view in the 12 x 12: New Artists/New Work series at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, curated by Dominic Molon. (March 2 - April 1, 2007)

For both exhibitions Schutter spent months drawing daily from a series of seven Dutch paintings within the Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Germany where Rembrandt’s Joseph and Potiphor’s Wife permanently resides. Through this practice he built up a knowledge of the works that was at once both physical and aesthetic, and from that foundation, returned to his studio to re-paint the Dutch group from only his memories of his interactions with the works. A perceptual investigation about seeing, remembering, and recording, this new body of work is also for Schutter an attempt to understand the more phenomenological aspects of looking at historical being through the model of painting. Schutter’s muted palette develops out of spare replies to the questions that occur during the painting process with remarks on the problems of representing essential information. What is apparent in the re-worked Potiphor group and the paintings on view at the MCA are the liminal traces of the material engagement, an ever changing balance of faith and doubt, and an eye that is burdened, yet engendered by the history of painting.

Lorraine Daston, author/editor of Things That Talk (Zone Books), writes on Schutter, “The fabled mimesis of the Dutch masters did not call forth mimesis in their twenty-first-century student. In the place of the deceptive surfaces that so seductively counterfeit three-dimensional appearances, the shimmering pearls of delicate lace that are only gobs of white paint, Schutter offers gray surfaces, opaque and inscrutable. Yet these secretive surfaces command attention in their turn, yielding details of shade and texture only upon long and close inspection. It is the viewer who pays the tribute of mimesis, by imitating, however feebly, the artist’s own feats of concentration in plumbing the painting for every nuance.”

David Schutter received his MFA from The University of Chicago. Solo exhibitions include afterpaintings, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2007), afterpaintings, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (2006), and Haarlem, from the Northwestern Dunes, Paul Kotula Projects, Detroit (2006). In 2005, Schutter received a Humboldt Grant and as a German Chancellor Scholar was a resident at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. In 2007 Schutter will have a solo exhibition at Galerie Aurel Scheibler, Berlin.