Dana Schutz
Hair on Fire, 2026
Hydrocal
Sculpture: 26 x 20.75 x 17.5 inches
Plinth: 2.75 x 20.5 x 15.5 inches
Overall dimensions: approximately 28.75 x 22.5 x 19 inches
Edition of 15 with 7 APs
Produced by Lisa Ivorian-Jones for the Hessel Museum of Art at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard)
We are thrilled to announce Hair on Fire, a new limited-edition sculpture by artist Dana Schutz and published by Lisa Ivorian-Jones, which was generously created by the artist to benefit the Hessel Museum of Art at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard). This extraordinary and enigmatic sculpted bust of a young girl with her hair on fire is also the artist’s first clay sculpture to be cast in Hydrocal cement. Bright white in appearance with the hardness of concrete, Hydrocal lends the sculpture a raw and lush immediacy, appearing like plaster or packed snow.
“Working with clay feels close to thinking — immediate, malleable, and always changing,” explains Schutz. “When I am sculpting, the form feels like it’s on the way to something, and then it catches on a subject. The sculpture Hair on Fire depicts the shifting expression of a young girl as her hair is upswept into smoke and flames. Depicting fire always feels like a kind of invention. It’s always moving and immaterial. The specific and distinct properties of the figure, smoke, and fire are all abstractly rendered in clay, and frozen in a moment.”
Each edition indelibly preserves the marks that were formed in the original clay sculpture by Schutz’s palms, fingers, and sculpting tools. When illuminated, the sculpture captures light and shadow akin to chiaroscuro, creating a relationship to the artist’s drawings, particularly her works in charcoal. The bust also evokes archetypes of femininity throughout art history, such as Nefertiti. In Hair on Fire, the girl’s inner world is closed off to us, and the curlicues of smoke encircling her head belie her placid demeanor.
At this time in our country and world in which women’s fundamental rights and safety are greatly at risk, the title takes on a deeper meaning. It comes to convey a state of utmost emergency — a fever pitch of unsustainable fury. Hair on Fire sends a grave message that is also cut with the artist’s characteristic humor: the plume of smoke on the bust’s left shoulder could be mistaken for a corsage, rather than a gaseous cloud — a girl on her way to her high school prom.
ABOUT DANA SCHUTZ
Dana Schutz (b. 1976) is a New York–based painter and sculptor who constructs complex, allegorical visual narratives that engage the capacity of art to represent subjective experience. Often depicting figures in seemingly impossible, enigmatic, or invented situations, her works reveal the deeper complications, tensions, and ambiguities of contemporary life. Schutz was born in Livonia, Michigan, and received her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art and her MFA from Columbia University, New York.
The first solo museum exhibition of Schutz’s work was held in 2004 at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, Kansas. The artist has since been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide, including the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts (2006; traveled to Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland); Museo d’arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Italy (2010); Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2010); Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (2011); and Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2012). In 2011, the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, presented Dana Schutz: If the Face Had Wheels, a retrospective featuring paintings and drawings created by the artist over the previous decade. The show subsequently traveled to the Miami Art Museum and the Denver Art Museum through 2013.
Additional solo presentations of Schutz’s work have taken place at The Hepworth Wakefield, England (2013; traveled to Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover, Germany, through 2014); Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2015); and the Transformer Station, Cleveland (2018). A major traveling exhibition of the artist’s work, Dana Schutz: The Visible World, was presented at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, in 2023, and traveled to the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris later that year. In 2024, Dana Schutz: The Island was held at The George Economou Collection in Athens, Greece.
In 2023, Dana Schutz, the first comprehensive monograph on the artist’s work, was published by Phaidon Press, with essays by Dan Nadel and Lynne Tillman and an interview with the artist by Hamza Walker.
Schutz has been represented by David Zwirner since 2020. Her first solo exhibition with the gallery, Dana Schutz: Jupiter’s Lottery, was presented in 2023 in New York. In 2024, Dana Schutz: The Sea and All Its Subjects was on view at David Zwirner Paris.
Schutz’s work is held in numerous institutional collections, including the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Cleveland Institute of Art; Cleveland Museum of Art; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Museo d’arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Italy; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, Kansas; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts; Rubell Museum, Miami; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Kansas; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.