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The American painter cakes her paintings in heavy layers of viscous pigment. This inaugural London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her material, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – earning her acclaim as a leading figurative artists of her generation – is focused on texture, application, hue and substance. This is art for artists, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy losing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s enough here to keep you going for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that really makes the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the first gallery are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. In one depicts a collection of forms trudges mindlessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and creating a path of trash in their wake. A different work presents a person receiving a huge mask in some bizarre initiation ritual before a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as commentary on America’s condition, on societal splits and furious, and crowd psychology is transforming all to rubbish.

The Kiss by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, instead of the masses that support them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a man in green sit back in gilded seats – whereas in other works a pair comfort one another in a scene strewn with corpses, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, lies naked, forlorn and powerless in bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, covered in references. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, countless nods to mainstream media (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 works.

A Model by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, complex and allegorical invites to analysis. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are two relatively clear themes: the people in power, and the crowds that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about that. In 2017, her painting Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of a historical figure, a black teenager who was lynched by two white men in a southern state in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. A protester demonstrated against the work daily, and others demanded it to be removed. A white artist depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of black pain was the biggest story of the event. This marked the height of the late 2010s social conflicts, a time that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a world increasingly polarized, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get upset at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her professional life, and the artist likely aims to move on. But everything she’s done since exists in its shadow. She unavoidably emerged of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political art at the top tier.