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The American painter cakes her paintings in heavy layers of viscous pigment. This inaugural 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 all about texture, application, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks losing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s enough here to engage you for a long time. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, symbolic visuals that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Works in the First Gallery

The works in the first gallery are full of giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. One piece shows a collection of forms trudges mindlessly towards something outside the frame, brandishing fists and creating a path of trash in their wake. A different work presents a figure receiving a large disguise in an odd initiation ritual before a horde of ugly supporters. It’s easy to read any of this as political, as observation on the state of the US, on how society is divided and angry, and crowd psychology is transforming all to rubbish.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to redirect attention to the people in power, rather than the crowds that follow them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a man in green recline in gilded seats – while in other works a couple comfort one another in a scene filled with dead bodies, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, rests naked, forlorn and powerless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, covered in references. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs 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 art historical tradition, numerous references to pop culture (It seems certain that one painting is a depiction of a cartoon character from an animated series). You could spend hours spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the works.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical invites to analysis. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Titian but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct themes: the people in power, and the public that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about that. Back in 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the body of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was lynched by two white men in Mississippi in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her own gain. An activist 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 African-American suffering was the biggest story of the event. It was the peak of the recent social conflicts, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. Looking back now, in a world more divided, simplified and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get angry at this heartfelt, sorrowful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But everything she’s done now exists in its shadow. She unavoidably emerged of that experience a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical painting at the highest level.