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The American painter cakes her canvases in heavy layers of gooey paint. Her inaugural London show is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her material, but significant themes are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as a leading painters of her era – is focused on surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks losing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s plenty to engage you for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, symbolic visuals that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Works in the First Gallery

The works in the first gallery are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. One piece depicts a group of figures stomps senselessly towards something outside the frame, waving hands and creating a path of debris in their path. A different work features a person given a large disguise in some bizarre ceremony in front of a horde of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to read any of this as political, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and angry, and mob mentality is transforming all to rubbish.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, rather than the crowds that support them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a man in green sit back in gilded seats – while in additional pieces a couple comfort one another in a scene strewn with dead bodies, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, rests naked, desolate and helpless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, covered in references. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, numerous references to pop culture (It seems certain that one painting is a depiction of a cartoon character from an animated series). You could spend hours identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the works.

A Model by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to analysis. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are two relatively clear themes: the people in power, and the crowds that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about such dynamics. Back in 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of a historical figure, a black teenager who was lynched by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. A protester picketed the work each day, and others demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist painting – perhaps compassionately – a image of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the biennial. It was the peak of the late 2010s culture wars, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the same side. Looking back now, in a society more divided, simplified and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her career, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But all her subsequent work now exists in its shadow. She inevitably emerged of that experience a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical painting at the top tier.