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The American painter cakes her paintings in heavy layers of viscous pigment. This inaugural London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute of her medium, but significant themes are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important painters of her era – is focused on surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, real high-level aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s enough here to engage you for a long time. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that really makes the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the first gallery are full of giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. One piece shows a collection of forms trudges mindlessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and creating a path of trash in their wake. A different work presents a figure receiving a huge mask in some bizarre ceremony in front of a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy to read any of this as political, as observation on America’s condition, on how society is divided and angry, and mob mentality is turning everything to waste.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the people in power, instead of the masses that support them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a green-clad man recline in gilded seats – while in other works a couple console each other in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, rests unclothed, forlorn and powerless in bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, filled with allusions. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the festive bizarre elements of James Ensor, 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 Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the works.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic invites to interpretation. I feel as if one is tested on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are two relatively clear themes: the ruling class, and the crowds that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about that. In 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of a historical figure, a young African-American who was murdered by two white men in a southern state in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. A protester demonstrated against the painting each day, and some called for it to be removed. A white artist painting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the biennial. This marked the height of the recent social conflicts, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a society more divided, simplified and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get upset at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But all her subsequent work since exists in its influence. She inevitably came out of that experience a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political painting at the highest level.