🔗 Share this article

The American painter smothers her canvases in thick gobs of viscous pigment. Her first proper London show is a messy, exuberant celebration of her medium, but some big messages are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – earning her acclaim as a leading painters of her era – is all about surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, real high-level aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s plenty to keep you going for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that really makes the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the first gallery are full of giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. One piece depicts a group of figures trudges mindlessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and leaving a trail of debris in their wake. A different work features a figure given a huge mask in an odd initiation ritual in front of a horde of ugly supporters. It’s easy to interpret these as social commentary, as observation on the state of the US, on how society is divided and furious, and mob mentality is transforming all to waste.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, instead of the masses that support them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a man in green recline in golden chairs – whereas in additional pieces a pair console each other in a landscape strewn with corpses, and a woman, perhaps the artist, rests naked, desolate and powerless in a bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, filled with allusions. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the history of painting, numerous references to pop culture (It seems certain that a particular work is a portrait of a cartoon character from an animated series). It would take time identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the artworks.

A Model by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic invites to analysis. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, 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 that. Back in 2017, her painting Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was lynched by two white men in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. An activist picketed the work each day, and some called for it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – perhaps compassionately – a image of African-American suffering was the major headline of the biennial. It was the peak of the late 2010s social conflicts, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. Looking back now, in a world more divided, simplified and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get angry at this emotional, mournful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

It could have ruined her career, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But everything she’s done since exists in its influence. She inevitably came out of that experience a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she continues to practice in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political art at the top tier.