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The American painter cakes her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. This first proper London show is a messy, exuberant celebration of her material, but some big messages are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important figurative artists of her era – is focused on surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks losing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, there’s enough here to engage you for a long time. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that really makes the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the first gallery are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. In one depicts a group of figures trudges mindlessly toward an event off canvas, waving hands and creating a path of debris in their wake. In another features a person given a large disguise in an odd ceremony before a horde of ugly supporters. It’s easy to read any of this as political, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and angry, and mob mentality is turning everything to rubbish.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, instead of the masses that follow them. Mysterious forms stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a green-clad man sit back in gilded seats – whereas in additional pieces a pair console each other in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, lies naked, forlorn and helpless in bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, filled with allusions. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the history of painting, countless nods to mainstream media (It seems certain that one painting is a portrait of a cartoon character from an animated series). It would take time spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the works.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to analysis. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct themes: the people in power, and the crowds that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about that. Back in 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of a historical figure, a young African-American who was murdered by two white men in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. A protester picketed the work each day, and some demanded it to be removed. A white artist painting – perhaps compassionately – a image of black pain was the major headline of the biennial. This marked the height of the recent social conflicts, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a world increasingly polarized, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get angry at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But all her subsequent work since exists in its shadow. She unavoidably emerged of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political art at the top tier.