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The American painter cakes her paintings in heavy layers of viscous pigment. Her inaugural London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her material, but significant themes are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as a leading painters of her era – is all about surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. This is art for artists, real high-level aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy losing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, there’s plenty to keep you going for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the first gallery are full of enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. In one depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and leaving a trail of trash in their path. In another presents a person receiving a huge mask in an odd 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 how society is divided and furious, and mob mentality is transforming all to waste.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, instead of the crowds that follow them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a green-clad man recline in golden chairs – whereas in other works a couple comfort one another in a scene strewn with dead bodies, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, rests unclothed, forlorn and powerless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, covered in references. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, 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 history of painting, countless nods to mainstream media (It seems certain that a particular work is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). You could spend hours identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the artworks.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

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

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about such dynamics. In 2017, her painting a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was lynched by racist perpetrators in a southern state in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of exploiting black death 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 biggest story of the biennial. This marked the height of the late 2010s social conflicts, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. Looking back now, in a world increasingly polarized, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get upset at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her professional life, and the artist likely aims to progress. But all her subsequent work since exists in its influence. She inevitably came out of that ordeal a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political art at the top tier.