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Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in heavy layers of viscous pigment. Her first proper London exhibition is a messy, exuberant celebration of her material, but significant themes are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as a leading painters of her generation – is focused on texture, application, hue and substance. This is art for artists, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s plenty to keep you going for a long time. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, symbolic visuals that truly drives the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the first gallery are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. In one shows a collection of forms stomps senselessly towards something off canvas, waving hands and leaving a trail of trash in their path. A different work presents a person given a large disguise in an odd initiation ritual before a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy to read any of this as political, as commentary on the state of the US, on societal splits and furious, and mob mentality is turning everything to rubbish.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, instead of the masses that follow them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a green-clad man recline in golden chairs – while in other works a couple comfort one another in a scene filled with corpses, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, lies unclothed, forlorn and powerless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, filled with references. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the history of painting, numerous references to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical invites to interpretation. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the people in power, and the crowds that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about that. Back in 2017, her painting Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of Emmett Till, a young African-American who was lynched by racist perpetrators in a southern state in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. A protester picketed the work each day, and some called for it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent painting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of black pain was the major headline of the event. It was the peak of the late 2010s culture wars, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. Looking back now, in a world more divided, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But everything she’s done now exists in its shadow. She inevitably emerged of that experience a changed artist. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political art at the highest level.