🔗 Share this article

The American painter smothers her canvases in heavy layers of gooey paint. This inaugural London exhibition is a messy, exuberant tribute of her medium, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as one of the most important painters of her era – is all about texture, application, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s plenty to engage you for a long time. 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 initial room are full of enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. One piece shows a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of debris in their path. A different work presents a figure given a huge mask in some bizarre ceremony in front of a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to read any of this as social commentary, as observation on the state of the US, on how society is divided and furious, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, rather than the crowds that follow them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a man in green recline in golden chairs – whereas in additional pieces a pair console each other in a landscape filled with corpses, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, lies naked, forlorn and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, filled with allusions. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, numerous references to mainstream media (It seems certain that one painting is a portrait of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the works.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to analysis. It seems like one is tested on the symbolism of a Titian but, in my view, there are two relatively clear narratives: the ruling class, and the crowds that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about such dynamics. In 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the body of a historical figure, a black teenager who was murdered by two white men in a southern state in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of exploiting black death for her own gain. An activist demonstrated against the painting daily, and others called for it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – perhaps compassionately – a image of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the event. It was the peak of the recent culture wars, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a society more divided, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get angry at this heartfelt, sorrowful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her career, and the artist likely aims to progress. But everything she’s done now exists in its shadow. She unavoidably came out of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical art at the highest level.