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Dana Schutz smothers her canvases in thick gobs of viscous pigment. Her inaugural London show is a messy, exuberant celebration of her material, but some big messages are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – which has seen her lauded as a leading painters of her generation – is focused on surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, there’s plenty to engage you for a long time. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the first gallery are full of giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. One piece shows a collection of forms trudges mindlessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and creating a path of trash in their wake. A different work features a figure receiving a large disguise in an odd 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 how society is divided and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to waste.

An Embrace by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the people in power, rather than the crowds that support them. Mysterious forms stuff their mouths with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a man in green sit back in gilded seats – while in additional pieces a couple comfort one another in a scene strewn with dead bodies, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, lies naked, desolate and powerless in a bed.

Inspirations and References

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, filled with allusions. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements 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 Handsome Squidward from an animated series). You could spend hours spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the works.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to interpretation. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Titian but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct themes: the ruling class, and the public that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about that. Back in 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of Emmett Till, a young African-American who was lynched by two white men in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. An activist picketed the work each day, and some demanded it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent depicting – perhaps compassionately – a image of black pain was the major headline of the event. It was the peak of the late 2010s culture wars, a time that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a society more divided, simplified and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But everything she’s done now exists in its shadow. She unavoidably came out of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political painting at the highest level.