The print is matted with corners in a passepartout 80 x 60 cm.

The New York-based painter Dana Schutz is best known for her narrative paintings, scenes often leavened by absurd humor in which her characters are thrown into situations of existential anxiety. The motif is based on a charcoal drawing Schutz created in 2015 and also found its way into a painting of the same title. For this edition, Schutz has rendered it as a woodcut and double monotype print, making each piece unique. The steep flight of stairs that appeared in the background of the earlier versions has given way to harsher contrasts and a rougher and flatter treatment of the surface, shifting the work’s art-historical references into a different register: it now hints at the revival of traditional printing techniques and Christian iconography in the European modernist’s works (Munch’s Madonna comes to mind). The protagonist’s bright yellow Adidas shirt, meanwhile, decidedly anchors the scene in the present.