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The American painter cakes her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. This first proper London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute of her medium, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as a leading figurative artists of her era – is focused on texture, application, hue and substance. This is art for artists, real high-level art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy losing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, 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 paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the first gallery are full of giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. One piece depicts a group of figures trudges mindlessly toward an event off canvas, waving hands and creating a path of debris in their path. In another features a figure receiving a large disguise in an odd initiation ritual before a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s easy 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 rubbish.

The Kiss by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the people in power, instead of the masses that follow them. Mysterious forms stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a man in green recline in golden chairs – while in additional pieces a pair comfort one another in a landscape filled with corpses, and a woman, perhaps the artist, lies naked, desolate and powerless in bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, filled with references. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the art historical tradition, numerous references to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a depiction of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the works.

A Model by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to analysis. I feel as if one is tested on the meaning of a Titian but, for my money, 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. In 2017, her painting Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered by two white men 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 personal benefit. An activist picketed the work each day, and others demanded it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent painting – 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 saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a society more divided, simplified and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get upset at this emotional, mournful painting.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her professional life, and the artist likely aims to progress. But everything she’s done since exists in its shadow. She inevitably emerged of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical art at the top tier.