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Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in heavy layers of viscous pigment. Her first proper London show is a messy, exuberant tribute of her material, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as a leading painters of her era – is focused on texture, application, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks losing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s enough here to keep you going for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that really makes the artworks resonate.

Works in the First Gallery

The works in the first gallery are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. One piece shows a group of figures stomps senselessly towards something off canvas, waving hands and creating a path of trash in their wake. A different work features a figure receiving a huge mask in some bizarre initiation ritual before a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy to read any of this as political, as observation on the state of the US, on societal splits and furious, and mob mentality is turning everything to rubbish.

The Kiss by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, instead of the crowds that follow them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a green-clad man recline in gilded seats – while in other works a pair console each other in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a woman, perhaps the artist, rests unclothed, desolate and powerless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, filled with allusions. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities 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 depiction of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). You could spend hours identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the works.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic 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 a couple of distinct themes: the people in power, 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 body of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was lynched by two white men in a southern state 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 own gain. An activist demonstrated against the painting each day, and others demanded it to be removed. An artist of European descent painting – perhaps compassionately – a image of black pain was the major headline 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. Looking back now, in a society more divided, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get angry at this emotional, mournful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her career, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But everything she’s done now exists in its influence. She unavoidably emerged of that experience a changed artist. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political painting at the highest level.