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Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in thick gobs of viscous pigment. This first proper London show is a messy, exuberant tribute of her material, but some big messages are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as a leading figurative artists of her generation – is all about texture, application, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks losing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s enough here to keep you going for a while. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the first gallery are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. In one depicts a group of figures stomps senselessly toward an event outside the frame, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their wake. A different work features a person given a large disguise in some bizarre ceremony before a horde of ugly supporters. It’s easy to read any of this as social commentary, as commentary on the state of the US, on societal splits and angry, and mob mentality is turning everything to waste.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the people in power, rather than the masses that follow them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a green-clad man recline in golden chairs – while in additional pieces a pair console each other in a landscape strewn with dead bodies, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, rests unclothed, desolate and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, covered in references. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the large-headed oddities of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the art historical tradition, countless nods to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a depiction of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the works.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to analysis. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Titian but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct themes: the ruling class, and the public that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about that. Back in 2017, her painting Open Casket – a partly abstract representation 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 displayed at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. A protester demonstrated against the painting each day, and others called for it to be destroyed. A white artist painting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the event. It was the peak of the recent social conflicts, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a world more divided, simplified and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get angry at this emotional, mournful painting.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her career, and the artist likely aims to progress. But all her subsequent work since 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 brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political art at the top tier.