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The American painter cakes her paintings in thick gobs of viscous pigment. Her inaugural London show is a messy, exuberant tribute of her material, but some big messages are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as a leading figurative artists of her generation – is all about surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, real high-level art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s enough here to keep you going for a long time. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that really makes the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the initial room are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. One piece shows a collection of forms trudges mindlessly towards something outside the frame, waving hands and creating a path of debris in their wake. A different work presents a figure receiving a large disguise in an odd initiation ritual before a horde of ugly supporters. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as observation on America’s condition, on how society is divided and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the people in power, rather than the crowds that follow them. Mysterious forms stuff their mouths with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a green-clad man recline in gilded seats – whereas in additional pieces a couple comfort one another in a landscape filled with corpses, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, lies unclothed, desolate and powerless in a bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, filled with allusions. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation 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 art historical tradition, 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.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to interpretation. It seems like one is tested on the symbolism of a Titian but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct themes: the people in power, and the public that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about that. Back in 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was lynched by racist perpetrators in a southern state in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her own gain. An activist picketed the work daily, and some called for it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of African-American suffering was the major headline of the biennial. It was the peak of the late 2010s 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 more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get angry at this heartfelt, sorrowful painting.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her career, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But everything she’s done now exists in its influence. She unavoidably emerged of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political painting at the highest level.