Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts presents David Schutter Rendition on view until March 31, 2013.
David Schutter, AIC 224 4, 2013. Oil on linen, 23 5/8 x 28 1/2 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and Aurel Scheibler, Berlin.
Rendition, a word implying the act of making, of interpretation, of taking a thing from one place to another by force, has its origin in the obsolete French or late Latin redditiō, meaning “return” in the sense of giving back. It proves to be a fitting title for a suite of paintings based on an ensemble by a 19th-century French landscape painter, which currently hangs in gallery 224 of the Art Institute of Chicago and to which the artist has returned on his habitual visits to the museum. The experience of images in a gallery, that purposeful chamber engineered for contemplative looking, and the encounter both bodily and cerebral with historical things whose allegories may have been lost with time, yet whose surfaces yield new problems and pleasures in equal measure, remains the crux of Schutter’s practice.
At the Logan Center Gallery, David Schutter presents his four new paintings in a room built specifically to the scale of the gallery which houses the four historical canvases that he has chosen to render. Scale aside, it may be difficult to recognize the origin of this presentation. But can we put scale aside? And what exactly is our relation to origins in this post-indexical era of pixels—of copies without originals?
A new photogravure presented in the adjacent gallery provides not so much an answer as a passage—a mise-en-abîme.
Curated by Monika Szewczyk, Visual Arts Program Curator, Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts. David Schutter is Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts, University of Chicago.
Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts
University of Chicago
915 E. 60th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
T +1 773 702 6082
arts.uchicago.edu/logan/gallery