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The American painter smothers her canvases in heavy layers of viscous pigment. Her first proper London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute of her material, but significant themes are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important figurative artists of her generation – is all about texture, application, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy losing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, there’s plenty to keep you going for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

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, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of trash in their wake. A different work presents a person given a large disguise in some bizarre ceremony before a horde of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to interpret these as political, as observation on America’s condition, on how society is divided and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, instead of the masses that follow them. Mysterious forms stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a man in green recline in gilded seats – whereas in additional pieces a pair console each other in a scene filled with dead bodies, and a woman, perhaps the artist, rests unclothed, forlorn and helpless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, filled with references. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the history of painting, numerous references to pop culture (It seems certain that a particular work 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

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical invites to analysis. It seems like 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 public that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about such dynamics. In 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of a historical figure, a young African-American who was lynched by two white men in a southern state in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. An activist demonstrated against the work each day, and others demanded it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of black pain was the biggest story of the event. It was the peak 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 increasingly polarized, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get angry at this emotional, mournful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

It could have ruined her professional life, and the artist likely aims to move on. But everything she’s done since exists in its influence. She unavoidably emerged of that ordeal a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political painting at the top tier.