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Dana Schutz cakes her canvases in thick gobs of viscous pigment. Her first proper London show is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her material, but significant themes are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as one of the most important figurative artists of her era – is focused on texture, application, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s plenty to engage you for a while. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, symbolic visuals that truly drives the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the first gallery are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. One piece shows a collection of forms trudges mindlessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and creating a path of trash in their path. In another features a person given a huge mask in some bizarre initiation ritual before a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and angry, and mob mentality is turning everything to rubbish.

An Embrace by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, instead of the masses that follow them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a man in green sit back in gilded seats – while in additional pieces a couple comfort one another in a scene strewn with corpses, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, rests unclothed, desolate and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, covered in references. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the history of painting, numerous references to mainstream media (It seems certain that one painting is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). You could spend hours identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the artworks.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to interpretation. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Titian but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct themes: the people in power, and the public that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about such dynamics. Back in 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of a historical figure, a young African-American who was lynched by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. An activist demonstrated against the painting daily, 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. Looking back now, in a world more divided, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get angry at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her career, and the artist likely aims to move on. But everything she’s done now exists in its shadow. She unavoidably came out of that experience a transformed creator. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political painting at the highest level.