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The American painter cakes her paintings in heavy layers of viscous pigment. This inaugural London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important painters of her era – is focused on texture, application, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s enough here to keep you going for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, 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 roaring mobs. In one depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly towards something off canvas, brandishing fists and creating a path of trash in their path. A different work features a person receiving a huge mask in an odd ceremony before a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to interpret these as political, as observation on the state of the US, on societal splits and angry, and crowd psychology is transforming all to rubbish.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the people in power, instead of the crowds that support them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a green-clad man sit back in gilded seats – whereas in additional pieces a couple comfort one another in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a woman, perhaps the artist, rests unclothed, desolate and powerless in bed.

Inspirations and References

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, filled with allusions. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the art historical tradition, countless nods to pop culture (It seems certain that a particular work is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). You could spend hours identifying 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 analysis. It seems like one is tested 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 bait.

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about that. Back in 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of a historical figure, a young African-American who was lynched by racist perpetrators in a southern state in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. An activist picketed the painting daily, and some called for it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – perhaps compassionately – a image of African-American suffering was the major headline of the event. It was the peak of the recent social conflicts, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a society increasingly polarized, simplified and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get angry at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her professional life, and the artist likely aims to progress. But everything she’s done since exists in its influence. She unavoidably came out of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political painting at the highest level.