After the End of the World

American artist Dana Schutz likes to begin each painting and sculpture she creates by asking ‘what if?’ By imagining a scenario, she opens up a fictional space in which characters and their actions unfold before us in a work of art. Sea Group 2022, a sculpture that bristles with noise and energy, is one of her imagined worlds. Its surface is riven with crevices, while its bulk is held up by scrawny legs. As you begin to recognise the misshapen and out-of-proportion bodies and faces, you can discern that they have wrapped their arms around one another, perhaps as a hostile scrum, or to keep each other upright. One person covers their head and rests on the embracing arms. Another appears animated, as though holding conversation: their swollen, carbuncled nose reminiscent of Bardolph, the comical character from Shakespeare’s plays. If you look closer, their legs are cut and gashed, as though this is the aftermath of a violent event. Nearby, a pair of walking aids have been driven into the ground. The ground itself looks like wreckage.

Sea Group was cast in bronze by the Workshop Art Fabrication Fine Art Foundry, outside New York City, from a clay model made by Schutz in 2022. It is based on an earlier oil painting of the same name, which makes clear that the huddled group is to be imagined surrounded by open ocean. This ‘sea group’ is stranded. Their violent wrestle has transformed into a precarious hug. The sculpture prompts the question: What happened to this group of people? Intrigued, I reached out to Schutz, who replied that:

'Sea Group is comprised of five inward-facing figures. Their expressions register different emotions as they tilt and bend, circling on top of a mound of jaws and noses. Their gestural forms billow like clouds, and the detritus at their feet resembles a broken alphabet or remnants from a previous civilization. The bracing characters could be conspiring, consoling each other or caught up in some kind of dance. Birds perch on top of crutches, denoting perhaps nearby land. The sculpture takes the form of a public monument, but it renders a private scene in process.'¹

The imagined scenarios that prompt Schutz’s creations tend to be dystopic. In 2002, she rose to prominence with her debut solo exhibition Frank from Observation at LFL Gallery, New York, where she presented 12 paintings that detailed the hypothetical life of the last man alive. The works were prompted by her question ‘if civilization came to an end, what would be art’s purpose?’ and the absurdity of an artwork without an audience.² In 2004, she produced a series of paintings depicting people who ate themselves, devouring their own limbs and faces in grotesque acts of self-digestion. Questions such as ‘how do you eat your own face?’³ were prompts to generate angular compositions of contorted bodies turned in on themselves. In a 2023 interview at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Schutz disclosed:

Sea Group articulates these thoughts. Just like the mythic Tower of Babel, where unity broke down after the confusion of language, the island ‘resembles a broken alphabet’. But instead of dispersing like the inhabitants of Babel, they must cling to the ‘remnants from a previous civilisation’. The huddled figures resemble those from 15th-century paintings of the Last Judgement, such as the work of Fra Angelico or Hieronymus Bosch. Schutz has also professed her admiration for sculptor Auguste Rodin’s grouped figures: perhaps The Burghers of Calais 1884–89 a sculpture that depicts a group of men condemned to death in 1346, is an appropriate counterpart.⁵ But Schutz doesn’t depict the past. She wants ‘there to be a feeling of this place … to suggest this paranoid time we’re in’.⁶ Which prompts a whole new question to the viewer: what will this group of people do now?

This story was first published in The Annual 2025.