🔗 Share this article

The American painter cakes her canvases in heavy layers of viscous pigment. This first proper London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but significant themes are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important painters of her era – is focused on texture, application, hue and substance. This is art for artists, real high-level aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks losing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s enough here to keep you going for a while. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that really makes the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the first gallery are full of giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. In one depicts a group of figures trudges mindlessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and creating a path of trash in their path. A different work features a person given a large disguise in some bizarre initiation ritual before a horde of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to read any of this as social commentary, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and angry, and mob mentality is turning everything to rubbish.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, instead of the masses that follow them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a man in green sit back in golden chairs – while in additional pieces a pair comfort one another in a scene strewn with dead bodies, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, lies naked, desolate and helpless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, filled with references. There’s 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 Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the history of painting, countless nods to pop culture (It seems certain that a particular work is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). It would take time spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the works.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

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

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about that. Back in 2017, her painting a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of a historical figure, a black teenager who was lynched by racist perpetrators in a southern state 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 demonstrated against the work each day, and others demanded it to be removed. An artist of European descent depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of black pain was the biggest story of the event. This marked the height of the recent social conflicts, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. Looking back now, in a society more divided, simplified and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get angry at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

It could have ruined her professional life, and the artist likely aims to move on. But everything she’s done now exists in its influence. She unavoidably emerged of that experience a changed artist. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political art at the top tier.