🔗 Share this article

Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in thick gobs of gooey paint. This first proper London show is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but significant themes are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Her method – earning her acclaim as a leading painters of her generation – is focused on texture, application, hue and substance. This is art for artists, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s plenty to keep you going for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that really makes the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the first gallery are full of giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. One piece shows a group of figures trudges mindlessly toward an event off canvas, waving hands and leaving a trail of debris in their wake. A different work features a figure receiving a large disguise in some bizarre ceremony in front of a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to interpret these as social commentary, as commentary on America’s condition, on societal splits and furious, and crowd psychology is transforming all to rubbish.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, rather than the crowds that support them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a man in green sit back in golden chairs – while in additional pieces a couple console each other in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, rests naked, forlorn and helpless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, covered in allusions. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the history of painting, countless nods to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a portrait of a cartoon character from an animated series). It would take time 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, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to analysis. 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 people in power, and the crowds that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about that. In 2017, her painting Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the body of a historical figure, a black teenager who was murdered by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. An activist picketed the painting daily, and some called for it to be removed. A white artist painting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of black pain was the biggest story of the event. It was the peak of the late 2010s culture wars, a time that featured infighting even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a world more divided, simplified and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her career, and the artist likely aims to move on. But everything she’s done now exists in its shadow. She unavoidably came out of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical art at the top tier.