🔗 Share this article

The American painter smothers her canvases in thick gobs of viscous pigment. This first proper London show is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute of her medium, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important painters of her generation – is all about surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy losing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, there’s plenty to engage you for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the first gallery are full of enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. One piece depicts a group of figures stomps senselessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and creating a path of trash in their wake. In another features a figure receiving a large disguise in some bizarre ceremony in front of a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to read any of this as social commentary, as commentary on America’s condition, on societal splits and furious, and mob mentality is transforming all to waste.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, instead of the crowds that follow 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 pair console each other in a landscape strewn with corpses, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, rests unclothed, desolate and helpless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, filled with references. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the history of painting, countless nods to pop culture (It seems certain that one painting is a portrait of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to analysis. It seems like one is tested on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the ruling class, and the crowds that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about such dynamics. In 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the body of a historical figure, a black teenager who was murdered by racist perpetrators in Mississippi 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 painting each day, and some demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist painting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of black pain was the major headline of the event. It was the peak of the recent culture wars, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. Looking back now, in a society increasingly polarized, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get upset at this emotional, mournful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

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 inevitably emerged of that ordeal a changed artist. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she continues to practice in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical art at the highest level.