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Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. Her inaugural London exhibition is a messy, exuberant tribute of her material, but some big messages are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as a leading painters of her era – is all about texture, application, hue and substance. 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 Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that really makes the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the first gallery are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. One piece depicts a group of figures stomps senselessly towards something off canvas, brandishing fists and creating a path of trash in their path. A different work presents a figure receiving a large disguise in some bizarre ceremony in front of a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy to read any of this as social commentary, as observation on the state of the US, on how society is divided and angry, and mob mentality is transforming all to waste.

The Kiss by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, instead of the crowds 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 gilded seats – while in other works a couple console each other in a landscape filled with corpses, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, rests naked, desolate and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, covered in allusions. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, numerous references to pop culture (It seems certain that one painting is a portrait of Handsome Squidward 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

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to interpretation. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are two relatively clear narratives: the ruling class, and the crowds that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about such dynamics. 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 racist perpetrators in a southern state 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 picketed the work daily, and some called for it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of black pain was the major headline of the biennial. This marked the height of the recent culture wars, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a world 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

This might have ended her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But all her subsequent work now exists in its influence. She unavoidably came out of that ordeal a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she continues to practice in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical art at the top tier.