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The American painter cakes her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. Her first proper London exhibition is a messy, exuberant celebration of her medium, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – which has seen her lauded as a leading painters of her era – is all about surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s plenty to keep you going for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that really makes the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the initial room are full of giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. In one depicts a group of figures stomps senselessly towards something outside the frame, waving hands and leaving a trail of debris in their wake. In another presents a figure receiving a huge mask in an odd initiation ritual before a horde of unattractive followers. It’s easy to read any of this as political, as observation on America’s condition, on how society is divided and furious, and mob mentality is transforming all to waste.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, rather than the masses that support them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a green-clad man sit back in golden chairs – whereas in additional pieces a pair comfort one another in a scene filled with dead bodies, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, rests naked, desolate and powerless in a bed.

Inspirations and References

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, covered in allusions. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the history of painting, numerous references to pop culture (It seems certain that a particular work is a portrait of a cartoon character from an animated series). You could spend hours identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the works.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to interpretation. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Titian but, in my view, there are two relatively clear themes: the people in power, and the crowds that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about that. Back in 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of a historical figure, a black teenager who was murdered by racist perpetrators in a southern state in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. A protester picketed the work each day, and others called for it to be removed. An artist of European descent painting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of black pain was the major headline of the biennial. It was the peak of the late 2010s culture wars, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a society 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

This might have ended her career, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But all her subsequent work now exists in its influence. She unavoidably came out of that experience a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical painting at the top tier.