🔗 Share this article

Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. This inaugural London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute of her material, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important painters of her era – is all about texture, application, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, truly advanced 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, symbolic visuals that really makes the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the first gallery are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. In one depicts a collection of forms trudges mindlessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and creating a path of debris in their path. A different work features a figure receiving a large disguise in an odd initiation ritual before a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to read any of this as social commentary, as commentary on the state of the US, on how society is divided and furious, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the people in power, instead of the crowds that follow them. Mysterious forms stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a man in green recline in golden chairs – whereas in additional pieces a couple console each other in a scene filled with corpses, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, lies unclothed, desolate and powerless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, filled with allusions. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the history of painting, numerous references to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a portrait of a cartoon character from an animated series). It would take time identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the artworks.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to analysis. I feel as if one is tested on the meaning of a Titian but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct themes: the people in power, and the crowds that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about such dynamics. In 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of a historical figure, a young African-American who was murdered by racist perpetrators in a southern state in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. An activist picketed the work each day, and some called for it to be removed. An artist of European descent painting – perhaps compassionately – a image of African-American suffering was the major headline of the biennial. It was the peak of the late 2010s social conflicts, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a world increasingly polarized, simplified and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get angry at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But all her subsequent work now exists in its influence. She inevitably emerged of that experience a changed artist. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political art at the highest level.