Drypoints

Dana Schutz’s new drypoints extend her restless painterly imagination into the demanding terrain of intaglio printmaking. Working directly on copper plates, she employed both traditional etching tools—burnishers, scrapers, roulettes, and needles—and unconventional ones such as sandpaper, a rotary machine, and a tattoo machine. The resulting images are charged with friction and vibration: their lines carry a sculptural intensity that seems to carve the image into being.

In these prints, Schutz revisits and transforms the worlds of her recent paintings, translating color and gesture into incision and burr. Each mark registers the physical pressure of her hand, transforming the act of drawing into a negotiation with resistance. The medium’s inherent delicacy—its shallow, easily worn lines—echoes the psychological fragility of Schutz’s invented scenes, where bodies inhabit implausible situations, and private anxieties take visible form.

Within these black-and-white fields, the absurd and the tragic remain in collision, their confrontation seen on a newly intimate scale. As in her paintings, Schutz tests the expressive limits of her materials, pushing form toward collapse and translating humor into pathos. The drypoint becomes not only a vehicle for image and narrative, but a record of endurance: of pressure, hesitation, and the persistence of the artist’s line against the plate’s unyielding surface.