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Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in thick gobs of gooey paint. Her inaugural London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute 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 a leading painters of her era – is all about surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s plenty to engage you for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

The works in the first gallery are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. One piece shows a collection of forms trudges mindlessly towards something outside the frame, waving hands and leaving a trail of trash in their path. A different work presents a person given a huge mask in an odd initiation ritual in front of a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to read any of this as political, as commentary on the state of the US, on how society is divided and furious, and mob mentality is turning everything to rubbish.

An Embrace by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, instead of the crowds that follow them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a man in green sit back in golden chairs – while in other works a couple console each other in a scene filled with corpses, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, lies naked, forlorn and helpless in a bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, filled with references. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the history of painting, countless nods to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the works.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic invites to interpretation. It seems like one is tested on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are two relatively clear narratives: the ruling class, and the public that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about that. In 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of Emmett Till, a young African-American who was lynched by racist perpetrators in a southern state in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of exploiting black death for her own gain. A protester picketed the painting each day, and others demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of black pain was the biggest story of the biennial. This marked the height of the recent culture wars, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. Looking back now, in a society more divided, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get upset at this emotional, mournful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

It could have ruined her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But all her subsequent work since exists in its shadow. She inevitably came out of that experience a transformed creator. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political art at the highest level.