🔗 Share this article

The American painter cakes her canvases in heavy layers of viscous pigment. Her inaugural London show is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute of her medium, but significant themes are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as one of the most important painters of her generation – is focused on texture, application, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, real high-level art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s enough here to engage you for a while. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that really makes the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the initial room are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. One piece depicts a collection of forms trudges mindlessly toward an event outside the frame, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of trash in their path. A different work features a person receiving a huge mask in some bizarre initiation ritual before a horde of unattractive followers. It’s easy to read any of this as political, as commentary on America’s condition, on societal splits and furious, and mob mentality is transforming all to rubbish.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, instead of the crowds that support them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a man in green recline in golden chairs – whereas in additional pieces a pair console each other in a scene filled with corpses, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, lies naked, forlorn and helpless in a bed.

Inspirations and References

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, covered in references. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the history of painting, countless nods to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a depiction of a cartoon character from an animated series). You could spend hours spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the works.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic invites to analysis. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the ruling class, and the public that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about such dynamics. In 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of Emmett Till, 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 Whitney Biennial. She was accused of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. A protester demonstrated against the painting each day, and some demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist painting – perhaps compassionately – a image of black pain was the major headline of the biennial. It was the peak of the late 2010s culture wars, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. Looking back now, in a world increasingly polarized, simplified and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But all her subsequent work now exists in its influence. She unavoidably emerged of that experience a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political art at the top tier.