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Dana Schutz cakes her canvases in heavy layers of viscous pigment. This inaugural London show is a messy, exuberant tribute of her material, but significant themes are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as one of the most important painters of her era – is focused on texture, application, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s enough here to engage you for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that really makes the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

The works in the first gallery are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. In one shows a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event outside the frame, brandishing fists and creating a path of trash in their wake. In another features a figure given a large disguise in some bizarre initiation ritual before a horde of unattractive followers. It’s easy to interpret these as social commentary, as observation on the state of the US, on societal splits and furious, and mob mentality is turning everything to waste.

An Embrace by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the people in power, instead of the crowds that follow them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a man in green sit back in gilded seats – while in other works a couple comfort one another in a landscape strewn with dead bodies, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, lies naked, forlorn and helpless in a bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, filled with references. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the large-headed oddities of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, countless nods to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure 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 sprinkled the artworks.

A Model by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic invites to interpretation. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct themes: the people in power, and the crowds that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about such dynamics. Back in 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the body of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was lynched by two white men in Mississippi in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. An activist picketed the work each day, and others demanded it to be removed. A white artist depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of black pain was the biggest story of the event. This marked the height of the late 2010s culture wars, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. Looking back now, in a society more divided, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get angry at this heartfelt, sorrowful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

It could have ruined her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But everything she’s done now exists in its shadow. 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.