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Dana Schutz cakes her canvases in heavy layers of viscous pigment. Her first proper London show is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but significant themes are smuggled through 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 all about texture, application, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, real high-level 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, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that really makes the artworks resonate.

Works in the First Gallery

The works in the first gallery are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. One piece depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly towards something outside the frame, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their wake. In another presents a person receiving a huge mask in an odd initiation ritual before a horde of ugly supporters. It’s easy to interpret these as social commentary, as observation on the state of the US, on societal splits and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to waste.

The Kiss by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the people in power, rather than the masses that support them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a man in green recline in golden chairs – whereas in other works a couple comfort one another in a scene filled with dead bodies, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, lies naked, desolate and powerless in a bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, covered in references. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the history of painting, countless nods to pop culture (It seems certain that one painting is a depiction of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the works.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to analysis. It seems like one is tested on the symbolism of a Titian but, for my money, there are two relatively clear narratives: the ruling class, and the crowds that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about that. Back in 2017, her painting Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of a historical figure, a black teenager who was murdered by two white men in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. A protester demonstrated against the painting each day, and some called for it to be removed. A white artist painting – perhaps compassionately – a image of black pain was the biggest story of the event. This marked the height of the late 2010s social conflicts, a time that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a society increasingly polarized, simplified and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get angry at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her career, and the artist likely aims to progress. But all her subsequent work now exists in its influence. She unavoidably emerged of that ordeal a changed artist. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical painting at the highest level.