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The American painter cakes her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. Her first proper London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her material, but some big messages are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as a leading painters of her era – is all about texture, application, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s enough here to engage you for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the initial room are full of giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. In one depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event outside the frame, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of trash in their wake. A different work features a person given a huge mask in some bizarre initiation ritual in front of a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to read any of this as social commentary, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and angry, and crowd psychology is transforming all to waste.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, instead of the crowds that support them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a green-clad man sit back in gilded seats – whereas in additional pieces a couple console each other in a landscape filled with corpses, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, lies unclothed, forlorn and helpless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, 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 big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, numerous references to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure 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.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to analysis. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the people in power, and the public that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about such dynamics. In 2017, her painting Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of a historical figure, a black teenager who was murdered by racist perpetrators in a southern state in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. An activist picketed the painting each day, and some demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist painting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the biennial. This marked the height of the late 2010s social conflicts, a time that featured infighting even if they were on the same side. Looking back now, in a world more divided, simplified and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her career, and the artist likely aims to move on. But all her subsequent work now exists in its shadow. She inevitably emerged of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political art at the highest level.