About This Item:

• Oil on Canvas

• Diptych

• 54” x 76”

• 2022-23

Douglas Max Utter (b 1950) is an award winning Cleveland based artist and writer, whose work has been shown extensively since the mid 1980’s, with over forty one- person shows in Cleveland, New York, Phoenix and Germany. Utter’s work in painting and criticism has been recognized with a 2011 Creative Workforce Fellowship, three Individual Fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council, the Best Painting Award at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s May Show (1987), and journalism awards from the Cleveland Press Club and the Poets and Writers Guild of Greater Cleveland. He is the recipient of a 2013 Cleveland Arts Prize, Lifetime Achievement Award.

Artist Statement:

The emotional inspiration and thematic content of recent paintings like “Iphigenia at Five Points” and the just completed “Foundling” are even more ambivalent. In the first a young woman, unconscious, is carried across a busy intersection late at night. At her feet a young man in a cap looks warily across toward the viewer. At her head an older man in a golden shirt and a florid complexion steps backward up onto a curb. Between them, under the sagging arch of the young woman’s body, street dogs howl and jocky for position, like a chorus. Another group of dogs is visible a number of yards away, along the middle slant of the composition. If this is a sacrifice, as the title suggests, what exactly is its purpose? In broad terms, I mean to pose a generational question, one being asked of and by Americans and American women in particular at this time. The injustice and cruelty of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his beloved daughter is a warning for all time, to those who would choose a dubious sense of duty over those they love.