An exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by Dana Schutz across the gallery’s two spaces on Duke Street, St. James’s. One Big Animal will be the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, following Shadow of a Cloud Moving Slowly in 2020, and major survey exhibitions in Europe in the intervening years.
Testing the canvas as an affective space, Schutz’s paintings often depict ambiguous scenes of singular, coupled or grouped figures in hypothetical, absurd or impossible situations, or strange narratives where imagined crises and social relations are held in tension. While deeply informed by history painting, her pictures see the specifics of time and place recede to bring forward heightened psychological states, sensations and deeper subjective experiences. Built from an alchemy of deftly worked wet-on-wet painting, the dramas on the canvas run the gamut of emotive registers from humour and joy to anxiety and hopelessness, within which the terrible and beautiful collide.
The exhibition title, One Big Animal, evokes the sense of a group acting as one organism, working in unison or formation, whether knowingly or blindly. The idea finds pictorial form in the painting Walking Boat, in which a vessel carrying Cyclopes and figures, each preoccupied in their own endeavours – lighting their path with a torch, or stitching one of the lemons scattered around the boat – strides forth illuminating or destroying what is in its path.
| Duration | 14 October 2025 - 20 December 2025 |
| Times | Tuesday to Friday 11am-6pm Saturday 12pm-6pm |
| Cost | Free |
| Venue | Thomas Dane Gallery |
| Address | 3 & 11 Duke Street St James's, London, SW1Y 6BN |
| Contact | / info@thomasdane.com / www.thomasdane.com |