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The American painter cakes her paintings in thick gobs of gooey paint. This inaugural London exhibition is a messy, exuberant celebration of her material, but some big messages are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as a leading figurative artists of her era – is all about surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s plenty to engage you for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that really makes the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

The works in the first gallery are full of enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. One piece shows a group of figures trudges mindlessly toward an event off canvas, waving hands and creating a path of debris in their wake. In another presents a figure receiving a large disguise in some bizarre ceremony before a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to read any of this as political, as observation on America’s condition, on how society is divided and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to waste.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, rather than the crowds that support 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 other works a couple comfort one another in a landscape filled with corpses, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, lies naked, desolate and powerless in bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, filled with references. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the history of painting, countless nods to pop culture (It seems certain that a particular work is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic invites to analysis. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Titian but, for my money, there are two relatively clear themes: the ruling class, and the public that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about such dynamics. In 2017, her painting Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of a historical figure, a young African-American who was murdered by two white men in Mississippi in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. A protester demonstrated against the work daily, and some demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of African-American suffering was the major headline of the event. It was the peak of the recent social conflicts, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. Looking back now, in a world increasingly polarized, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get angry at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But everything she’s done since exists in its shadow. She inevitably emerged of that experience a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical art at the highest level.