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

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as one of the most important figurative artists of her generation – is focused on surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks losing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, there’s plenty to engage you for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that really makes the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the initial room are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. In one shows a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of trash in their wake. A different work presents a person receiving a large disguise in an odd ceremony in front of a horde of ugly supporters. It’s easy to read any of this as political, as commentary on the state of the US, on societal splits and furious, and mob mentality is turning everything to waste.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the people in power, rather than the masses that follow them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a man in green recline in golden chairs – whereas in additional pieces a couple console each other in a landscape strewn with dead bodies, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, lies naked, desolate and powerless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, covered in references. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, numerous references to pop culture (It seems certain that a particular work is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to analysis. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the people in power, and the public that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about such dynamics. Back in 2017, her painting a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was lynched by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. An activist demonstrated against the painting daily, and some demanded it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent painting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of African-American suffering was the major headline of the biennial. It was the peak of the recent social conflicts, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a world more divided, simplified and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get angry at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But everything she’s done now exists in its influence. She inevitably emerged of that ordeal a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical art at the top tier.