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Dana Schutz smothers her canvases in thick gobs of viscous pigment. Her inaugural London show is a messy, exuberant tribute of her medium, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important figurative artists of her generation – is focused on surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks losing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s enough here to engage you for a while. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that really makes the artworks resonate.

Works in the First Gallery

The works in the first gallery are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. One piece depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and leaving a trail of trash in their wake. A different work presents 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 social commentary, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and furious, and crowd psychology is transforming all to waste.

The Kiss by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the people in power, rather than the masses that support them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a man in green recline in golden chairs – while in other works a pair console each other in a scene strewn with corpses, and a woman, perhaps the artist, lies naked, forlorn and powerless in a bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, filled with allusions. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, numerous references to mainstream media (It seems certain that one painting is a depiction of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the artworks.

A Model by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to analysis. It seems like one is tested on the meaning of a Titian but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the ruling class, and the public that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about that. Back in 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of a historical figure, a black teenager who was lynched by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in 1955 – caused untold controversy 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 painting each day, and some demanded it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the event. It was the peak of the late 2010s 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 increasingly polarized, 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 professional life, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But everything she’s done since exists in its influence. She inevitably came out of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical painting at the top tier.