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Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in thick gobs of viscous pigment. Her inaugural London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her material, but some big messages are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as a leading painters of her generation – is all about surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. 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 keep you going for a while. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, symbolic visuals that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the initial room are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. In one depicts a group of figures stomps senselessly towards something off canvas, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of trash in their wake. A different work features a figure receiving a large disguise in some bizarre ceremony in front of a horde of unattractive followers. It’s easy to read any of this as social commentary, as observation on America’s condition, on how society is divided and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to waste.

An Embrace by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, instead of the crowds that follow them. Mysterious forms stuff their mouths with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a green-clad man sit back in gilded seats – while in additional pieces a pair comfort one another in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a woman, perhaps the artist, rests naked, desolate and helpless in bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, covered in allusions. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, countless nods to mainstream media (It seems certain that a particular work is a depiction of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the artworks.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic invites to interpretation. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Titian but, in my view, there are two relatively clear themes: the ruling class, and the public that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about such dynamics. Back in 2017, her painting Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was lynched by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. An activist picketed the work daily, and some called for it to be removed. An artist of European descent depicting – perhaps compassionately – a image of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the biennial. It was the peak of the recent culture wars, a period that featured infighting 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 individuals found moments to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But everything she’s done now exists in its shadow. She unavoidably came out of that experience a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical art at the top tier.