🔗 Share this article

The American painter smothers her canvases in heavy layers of gooey paint. Her inaugural London show is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but significant themes are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – earning her acclaim as a leading painters of her era – is focused on surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. This is art for artists, real high-level art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s plenty to keep you going for a while. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the initial room are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. In one shows a group of figures trudges mindlessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and creating a path of trash in their path. In another features a figure receiving a huge mask in an odd initiation ritual in front of a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as commentary on America’s condition, on societal splits and furious, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

The Kiss by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, rather than the crowds that support them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a green-clad man recline in gilded seats – whereas in additional pieces a couple console each other in a scene filled with dead bodies, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, rests unclothed, desolate and powerless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, filled with allusions. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, 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 art historical tradition, countless nods to pop culture (It seems certain that one painting is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

A Model by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic invites to interpretation. 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 such dynamics. In 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the body of Emmett Till, a young African-American who was murdered by two white men in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. A protester picketed the work daily, and some called for it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent painting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of black pain was the major headline of the biennial. It was the peak of the recent social conflicts, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. Looking back now, in a world more divided, simplified and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful 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 unavoidably came out of that ordeal a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political painting at the top tier.