🔗 Share this article

The American painter cakes her canvases in heavy layers of gooey paint. Her inaugural London show is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Her method – earning her acclaim as a leading painters of her era – is focused on surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy 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

These pieces in the initial room are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. In one depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and leaving a trail of trash in their wake. In another features a figure given a huge mask in an odd initiation ritual in front of a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to read any of this as political, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the people in power, instead of the crowds that follow them. Mysterious forms stuff their mouths with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a man in green sit back in golden chairs – whereas in other works a pair console each other in a landscape strewn with dead bodies, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, lies unclothed, desolate and powerless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, filled with allusions. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of James Ensor, the large-headed oddities of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, numerous references to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a depiction of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the artworks.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, complex and allegorical 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 narratives: the ruling class, and the crowds that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about that. Back in 2017, her painting a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered by two white men in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. An activist demonstrated against the work daily, and others demanded it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of black pain was the major headline of the event. 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, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

It could have ruined her professional life, and the artist likely aims to progress. But everything she’s done since exists in its influence. She inevitably came out of that experience a transformed creator. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political painting at the highest level.