HUMLEBAEK.- The big spring exhibition at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art presents the American artist Dana Schutz (b. 1976), who has already become a classic in contemporary painting. Her mid-career survey at Louisiana is living proof of how much painting, despite its years, continues to offer the world.

There is no dearth of figurative painting out there. Over the last decade, Louisiana has showcased a number of today’s most important painters, and introducing Dana Schutz to the Scandinavian public naturally continues the recent string of exhibitions.

Clearly, Schutz is not an artist who relies on observation. She is not on social media, either, or trawls the ever-expanding archives of Google for her heroes. Then where does she turn? The answer is that Schutz evolves her art based mainly on her countless affinities with the masters of art history, from the Middle Ages to the heavy hitters of modernism – Philip Guston (1913-1980) more than anyone else but also a contemporary painter like the Danish-Israeli Tal R (b. 1967). They are with her when she projects her thoughts onto canvas or onto the paper of charcoal drawings or, as in recent years, when she builds her scenarios as sculptures.

Schutz has made her mark with immense narrative power, intense colours and a knack for dramatic compositions; she is a history painter for our time. Often, she starts her paintings by making mental sketches, ideas whose execution foreshadows her handling of oils, brushes and canvas. She rarely improvises in ways that reveal any guidance from the brushwork itself. No haze of oil.

The starting point for a work can be a word or an idiom or an image of how a certain sequence of actions might unfold. The titles precede the pictures. Indeed, the relationship between words and images is central to her art. What does a violent sneeze look like? Imagination is key. So much so, in fact, that we are dealing with the art of the invisible – that is, something that does not already have an “image”.

Grotesque, apocalyptic scenarios

Spanning just over two decades, Schutz’s work reveals her singular relationship to the grotesque – the imagination-powered, weird and unnatural. Beauty rarely matters in her work, proving that her luxurious abundance of technique is primarily at the service of ideas, undiverted by painterly digressions.

In the first decade of this century, her paintings were inhabited by figures undergoing a constant process of dissolution and decay, transformers of sorts assembling and reforming against the background of unknown disasters. Viewing her works from back then, alongside the big, new paintings she has made for this exhibition, can leave you wondering where in the overall civilizational and societal process we are. Before, during or after the disaster?

Apocalyptic by nature, these near-biblical images provide an occasion to meditate on the folly of humankind, including our self-deceptions. We are on the edge, as people push on, float in boats or climb to the top of the highest mountain, pointing and gesticulating as if they possessed the pivotal idea to resolve the situation. Towers of Babel, tsunamis, the blind leading the blind and wheels of life turning are handy references when the civil or political context fades into obscurity. But make no mistake, Schutz is neither escapist nor ignorant about the world. She leaves us hanging in the middle of it.

The exhibition’s title, Between Us, may refer to all the things in human interaction that take place between us and divide or connect us, including the interaction between artwork and viewer.