🔗 Share this article

The American painter cakes her canvases in heavy layers of viscous pigment. This inaugural London show is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her material, but significant themes are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important figurative artists of her generation – is focused on texture, application, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks losing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s plenty to engage you for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the initial room are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. One piece depicts a group of figures trudges mindlessly towards something outside the frame, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their wake. A different work presents a figure receiving a huge mask in some bizarre initiation ritual before a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to read any of this as political, as commentary on America’s condition, on societal splits and furious, and mob mentality is turning everything to waste.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to shift her focus to the people in power, rather than the masses that follow them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a green-clad man recline in gilded seats – whereas in additional pieces a couple comfort one another in a scene filled with corpses, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, lies naked, desolate and powerless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, filled with allusions. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the history of painting, countless nods to mainstream media (It seems certain that a particular work is a depiction of a cartoon character from an animated series). It would take time identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the works.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic invites to interpretation. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Titian but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct themes: the ruling class, and the crowds that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about that. Back in 2017, her painting Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of Emmett Till, a young African-American who was murdered by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. An activist picketed the painting daily, and some called for it to be removed. A white artist depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the event. It was the peak 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 more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get angry at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

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