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The American painter cakes her canvases in heavy layers of gooey paint. This first proper London exhibition is a messy, exuberant celebration of her material, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Her method – earning her acclaim as one of the most important figurative artists of her era – is all about texture, application, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy losing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s enough here to keep you going for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that really makes the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the initial room are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. In one depicts a group of figures stomps senselessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and leaving a trail of trash in their path. In another features a figure given a large disguise in an odd initiation ritual in front of a horde of ugly supporters. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as observation on the state of the US, on societal splits and furious, and mob mentality is turning everything to waste.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to redirect attention to the people in power, instead of the masses that follow them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a man in green recline in gilded seats – while in additional pieces a couple console each other in a scene strewn with corpses, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, lies unclothed, forlorn and helpless in bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, filled with allusions. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the festive bizarre elements of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the history of painting, numerous references to pop culture (It seems certain that one painting is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). You could spend hours spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to analysis. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct themes: the ruling class, and the crowds that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about such dynamics. In 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of a historical figure, a young African-American who was murdered 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. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. A protester picketed the painting each day, and some demanded it to be removed. A white artist depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of black pain was the biggest story of the event. It was the peak of the recent culture wars, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. Looking back now, in a world more divided, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get angry at this emotional, mournful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her career, and the artist likely aims to move on. But all her subsequent work now exists in its shadow. She inevitably came out of that ordeal a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical art at the highest level.