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The American painter smothers her canvases in heavy layers of gooey paint. This first proper London show is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute of her material, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as a leading painters of her generation – is focused on surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s enough here to keep you going for a long time. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that truly drives the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the initial room are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. In one depicts a collection of forms trudges mindlessly towards something outside the frame, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their wake. A different work features a figure receiving a huge mask in some bizarre initiation ritual in front of a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy to interpret these as social commentary, as commentary on the state of the US, on how society is divided and furious, and mob mentality is transforming all to rubbish.

An Embrace by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to shift her focus to the people in power, instead of the masses that support them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a green-clad man sit back in golden chairs – while in other works a pair console each other in a landscape filled with corpses, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, rests naked, desolate and powerless in a bed.

Inspirations and References

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, covered in references. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the history of painting, countless nods to mainstream media (It seems certain that a particular work is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). You could spend hours identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to analysis. It seems like one is tested on the meaning of a Titian but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the ruling class, and the crowds that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about such dynamics. Back in 2017, her painting 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 Mississippi in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. An activist demonstrated against the work each day, and others demanded it to be removed. An artist of European descent depicting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of black pain was the biggest story of the biennial. 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. In retrospect, in a society increasingly polarized, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get upset at this emotional, mournful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her career, and the artist likely aims to progress. But everything she’s done since exists in its influence. She inevitably came out of that experience a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical art at the top tier.