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The American painter smothers her paintings in thick gobs of gooey paint. This inaugural London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but significant themes are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as a leading figurative artists of her generation – is all about texture, application, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy losing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s plenty to engage you for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the first gallery are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. One piece depicts a collection of forms trudges mindlessly towards something outside the frame, waving hands and creating a path of trash in their path. In another features a figure given a huge mask in an odd initiation ritual in front of a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s easy to read any of this as social commentary, as commentary on America’s condition, on how society is divided and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to waste.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to redirect attention to the people in power, instead of the masses that follow them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a green-clad man recline in golden chairs – whereas in other works a couple console each other in a landscape filled with corpses, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, lies unclothed, desolate and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, covered in references. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, numerous references 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 spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the works.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to analysis. It seems like one is tested on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are two relatively clear themes: the ruling class, and the crowds that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about that. Back in 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was lynched by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. A protester picketed the work each day, and some called for it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent depicting – perhaps compassionately – a image of black pain was the biggest story of the biennial. 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. In retrospect, in a society increasingly polarized, simplified and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her career, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But all her subsequent work now exists in its influence. She inevitably came out of that ordeal a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical art at the top tier.