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The American painter cakes her paintings in heavy layers of viscous pigment. This inaugural London exhibition is a messy, exuberant tribute of her material, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as a leading painters of her era – is all about texture, application, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, real high-level aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks losing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s enough here to engage you for a long time. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, symbolic visuals that really makes the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the first gallery are full of giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. One piece depicts a group of figures stomps senselessly towards something outside the frame, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their path. A different work features a person receiving a large disguise in some bizarre ceremony before a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s easy to interpret these as social commentary, as observation on the state of the US, on societal splits and angry, and mob mentality is turning everything to waste.

The Kiss by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, instead of the crowds that follow them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a man in green recline in gilded seats – while in other works a pair console each other in a scene filled with corpses, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, lies unclothed, forlorn and helpless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, filled with references. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the festive bizarre elements of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the art historical tradition, numerous references to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). It would take time spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, complex and allegorical invites to analysis. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Titian but, for my money, there are two relatively clear themes: the ruling class, and the crowds that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about such dynamics. In 2017, her painting Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of exploiting black death for her own gain. 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 black pain was the biggest story of the biennial. It was the peak of the recent social conflicts, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a world increasingly polarized, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get angry at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her career, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But all her subsequent work since exists in its shadow. She unavoidably came out of that experience a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical painting at the highest level.