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Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in heavy layers of viscous pigment. Her inaugural London show is a messy, exuberant celebration of her material, but some big messages are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Her method – earning her acclaim as a leading figurative artists of her era – is focused on surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, there’s plenty to keep you going for a long time. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, symbolic visuals that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the first gallery are full of giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. In one depicts a collection of forms trudges mindlessly toward an event off canvas, waving hands and leaving a trail of debris in their path. In another presents a figure given a large disguise in some bizarre ceremony in front of a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy to read any of this as political, as commentary on America’s condition, on societal splits and furious, and mob mentality is transforming all to waste.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to shift her focus to the people in power, instead of the crowds that support them. Mysterious forms stuff their mouths with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a green-clad man sit back in gilded seats – whereas in other works a couple comfort one another in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, lies unclothed, forlorn and helpless in bed.

Inspirations and References

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, filled with references. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the history of painting, numerous references to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). It would take time identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to interpretation. It seems like one is tested on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct themes: the ruling class, and the public that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about that. Back in 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered by two white men in a southern state in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her own gain. A protester picketed the work daily, and others called for it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent painting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of black pain was the biggest story of the biennial. It was the peak of the late 2010s social conflicts, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a world more divided, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her career, and the artist likely aims to progress. But all her subsequent work since exists in its influence. She unavoidably emerged of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical painting at the top tier.