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The American painter cakes her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. This first proper London show is a messy, exuberant celebration of her material, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – earning her acclaim as a leading figurative artists of her generation – is focused on texture, application, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy losing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s plenty to engage you for a while. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

The works in the first gallery are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. In one shows a collection of forms stomps senselessly towards something outside the frame, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their path. A different work presents a figure given a huge mask in an odd ceremony before a horde of ugly supporters. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as observation on the state of the US, on how society is divided and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to waste.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, rather than the masses that support them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a man in green recline in golden chairs – while in additional pieces a couple comfort one another in a landscape filled with corpses, and a woman, perhaps the artist, rests naked, forlorn and powerless in a bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, covered in allusions. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the history of painting, numerous references to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). It would take time spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the works.

A Model by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic invites to analysis. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are two relatively clear themes: the people in power, and the crowds that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about that. In 2017, her painting Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of a historical figure, a black teenager who was murdered by racist perpetrators in a southern state in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. An activist picketed the work each day, and some demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist painting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of black pain was the major headline of the event. This marked the height of the late 2010s social conflicts, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. Looking back now, in a society more divided, simplified and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get upset at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her career, and the artist likely aims to progress. But everything she’s done now exists in its shadow. She inevitably emerged of that ordeal a transformed creator. 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.