Dena Schutzer: Agitation and Retreat

Exhibition Dates
April 22 – May 17, 2025
Opening Reception
Thurs, April 24, 2025, 5PM-8PM
Gallery Hours
Tuesday-Saturday, 11AM-6PM

Bowery Gallery is pleased to announce
Agitation and Retreat
, an exhibition of recent paintings by Dena Schutzer, in her fifth solo show at the gallery.

Describing the work in the show, the artist says:
“Together, these oil paintings are a chronicle of observed moments in public and private spaces.”

Schutzer’s imagery reflects this wide-open approach—what has caught her eye ranges from a view of a New York street in the giant shadows of looming new skyscrapers, to an intimate scene of the artist’s elderly mother taking a bath. Intuiting a kind of drama in these elements of direct perception provides what Schutzer calls the “initial jolt” that impels her to respond in paint.

For Schutzer, this mysterious process—the joy and struggle of proceeding from that first sensation to a new, composed reality on the canvas–has everything to do with her pleasure in the possibilities of paint itself. Her loose but decisive brushwork and bold color tensions and harmonies—acid greens, clashing blues, pervasive violets—don’t let go of the viewer until one has taken in all the oppositions, juxtapositions, parallels from which her brushstroke emerges, still present as a brushstroke, but also, finally, as an essential part of a new and highly personal image.

The opening reception will be held on Thursday, April 24, 5pm – 8pm.

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