🔗 Share this article

Dana Schutz cakes her canvases in heavy layers of gooey paint. This inaugural London show is a messy, exuberant celebration of her medium, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you manage to uncover them.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – which has seen her lauded as a leading figurative artists of her generation – is all about surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, there’s plenty to engage you for a while. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that truly drives the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the first gallery are full of enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. In one depicts a group of figures trudges mindlessly towards something off canvas, waving hands and creating a path of debris in their wake. In another features a figure given a huge mask in an odd ceremony before a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to read any of this as political, as commentary on America’s condition, on societal splits and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

An Embrace by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, rather than the masses that follow them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a man in green recline in golden chairs – whereas in other works a couple comfort one another in a scene strewn with corpses, and a woman, perhaps the artist, lies naked, forlorn and powerless in bed.

Inspirations and References

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, covered in references. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the history of painting, numerous references to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a portrait of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the works.

A Model by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to interpretation. It seems like one is tested on the meaning of a Titian but, for my money, there are two relatively clear narratives: the ruling class, and the crowds that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about such dynamics. Back in 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was lynched by two white men in a southern state in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. A protester picketed the painting each day, and some demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – perhaps compassionately – a image of black pain was the biggest story of the event. This marked the height of the recent culture wars, a time 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 feels almost quaint that people had the time to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

It could have ruined her career, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But everything she’s done now exists in its influence. She unavoidably came out of that experience a changed artist. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political painting at the highest level.