Dana Schutz and the exhibition Trouble and Appearance in Munich

From the AD HOC NEWS Art Desk » Award & Prize Desk - The editors cover exhibitions, auctions, collections, prizes and artistic positions. Published: August 20, 2026 · Last checked: August 20, 2026, 11:53 AM

Dana Schutz has become one of the most closely watched painters of her generation through dense, narrative canvases and sculptural experiments. Her recent institutional projects, including Trouble and Appearance in Munich and The Visible World in Paris, show how drawing, painting and sculpture intersect in her work.

The exhibition Trouble and Appearance

The Pinakothek der Moderne and the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich present the exhibition Trouble and Appearance, which focuses for the first time on Dana Schutz's drawings and large-scale charcoal murals. The museum highlights a new group of wall-sized works created specifically for the venue, emphasizing their relation to American Abstract Expressionist murals and to the history of large-scale drawing. The German-language exhibition page underlines that this is Schutz's Munich debut in the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung and notes that the show centers on works in charcoal rather than on her better-known oil paintings.

According to the institution, the exhibition runs in the graphic collection galleries at the Pinakothek der Moderne and frames Schutz's work within a broader conversation on drawing as an autonomous medium. The museum text stresses that the new murals reach lengths of up to around six meters and that the presentation includes preparatory sketches for paintings that had previously remained unseen in public contexts. This institutional framing positions Schutz not only as a painter but as an artist who reconsiders drawing as an expanded, spatial practice in dialogue with architecture and viewers' movement.

Exhibition history and recent retrospectives

The Munich project follows a series of major institutional presentations that have traced Dana Schutz's development over the past two decades. The Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris organized the exhibition Dana Schutz. Le monde visible, also referred to as The Visible World, which brought together around forty paintings, twenty drawings and etchings, and seven sculptures from the early 2000s to recent years. The museum described this show as a comprehensive survey, developed in close collaboration with the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, demonstrating how drawing, painting and sculpture intertwine in Schutz's practice.

This European survey context, coupled with earlier exhibitions such as Between Us at the Louisiana Museum and earlier American presentations like If the Face Had Wheels at the Neuberger Museum of Art and the Denver Art Museum, underscores an institutional trajectory that now feeds into the focused drawing exhibition in Munich. For viewers and collectors, Trouble and Appearance can therefore be read as a deep dive into the graphic foundation underlying the more widely known paintings, situated within a broader arc of surveys and retrospectives.

The work core and media

Dana Schutz is best known for large-format figurative paintings that combine compressed narratives with a heightened, often acidic color palette. Series such as Swimming, Smoking, Crying, Shaking Hands and works around historical or literary figures have established her as a central voice in contemporary painting. Her pictures often stage bodies in precarious, sometimes absurd constellations, balancing humor and discomfort.

Alongside painting, Schutz has increasingly developed sculpture and works on paper, which have been integrated into recent exhibitions. The Paris survey, for instance, included seven sculptures and demonstrated how three-dimensional work echoes the compressed figures of the canvases. In Munich, the focus on charcoal murals and drawing shows how she constructs complex compositions through layered lines, erasures and reworking, giving viewers insight into the structural decisions underlying the finished paintings.

Where the artist stands now

Overall, Dana Schutz occupies a position as a widely exhibited painter and draughtswoman whose recent institutional projects in Europe and the United States underscore the ongoing expansion of her practice across drawing, painting and sculpture.

This article was produced with a.i. support and editorially reviewed. All statements without guarantee; auction results, exhibition dates and awards may change at short notice.