Monumental sculpture by Dana Schutz to be unveiled at Kistefos

Kistefos is proud to announce an upcoming new commissioned work in its sculpture park: the monumental bronze sculpture Blind Boat by American artist Dana Schutz (b. 1976). The work will be unveiled at the season opening on 9 May. Schutz is regarded as one of the most significant artists of her generation, known for her distinctive artistic language characterised by expressive paintings and sculptures.

The ambitious sculptural group Blind Boat is the artist’s first monumental outdoor sculpture, created specifically for Kistefos Museum. The impressive bronze work stands 7 metres tall, stretches 9 metres in length, and weighs more than 12 tonnes.

Blind Boat represents a significant development in Schutz’s practice. Long recognised as one of the most distinctive painters of her generation, she began making sculptures in 2018. These works are first modelled in clay before being cast in bronze. Their surfaces retain traces of this process, with visible marks of shaping and the artist’s hand.

Schutz’s sculptures exist within the same expressive universe as her vivid paintings: almost as if released from the canvas, the same distorted, energetic figures now take on a physical presence. Even when cast in bronze, they maintain a distinctly painterly quality, with raw, tactile surfaces that bear the trace of the artist’s hand. The result is a kind of sculpture less concerned with classical balance and idealised form, and more with gesture and dynamic presence.

Blind Boat demonstrates Schutz’s unique ability to construct dynamic constellations of forms and figures. The sculpture depicts a boat carrying three characters, surrounded by elements such as a stylised sun, hollowed-out eyeballs, and a carrion bird holding a pupil in its beak. The figures in the boat are either blind or one-eyed, evoking the Cyclopes of Greek mythology. The central figure holds their companion’s eyeball aloft as a guiding light.

Such absurd scenarios are characteristic of Schutz, who often employs satire to address the challenges of contemporary society. The sculpture’s monumental scale amplifies a sense of hubris—humanity’s exaggerated belief in its own ability to see and control the world. The work can be read in light of several of today’s major crises, including the refugee crisis and the climate crisis, as an image of a world in which the blind lead the blind.

At Kistefos, the sculpture will be situated in dialogue with the surrounding landscape and the waterfall behind it. The continuous sound of rushing water will enhance the work’s sensory qualities, creating an interplay between the solidity of cast bronze and the perception of a dynamic sculpture in motion—like a single organism in turbulent, yet directionless, movement.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Dana Schutz (b. 1976, USA) is an American artist known for her expressive, figurative paintings characterised by vivid colours, narrative scenarios, and often grotesque or absurd motifs. She received her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art (2000) and her MFA from Columbia University (2002), and lives and works in New York.

Schutz rose to prominence in the early 2000s and has since presented numerous major institutional solo exhibitions, including at the Rose Art Museum (2006), Museo d’arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (2010), Neuberger Museum of Art (retrospective, 2011–13), The Hepworth Wakefield (2013), Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2015), and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2017). More recent presentations include Between Us at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (2023) and The Visible World at Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (2023).

She has also participated in major international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial, and Greater New York at MoMA PS1.

Her work is held in numerous leading public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.