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The American painter cakes her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. This first proper London exhibition is a messy, exuberant tribute of her material, but some big messages 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 all about texture, application, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, there’s plenty to keep you going for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, symbolic visuals that really makes the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the initial room are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. In one depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly towards something off canvas, brandishing fists and creating a path of trash in their path. A different work presents a person receiving a huge mask in an odd ceremony before a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy to interpret these as social commentary, as commentary on the state of the US, on how society is divided and furious, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

An Embrace by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the people in power, rather than the masses that follow them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a green-clad man recline in gilded seats – while in additional pieces a pair comfort one another in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a woman, perhaps the artist, lies naked, desolate and helpless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, covered in allusions. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of James Ensor, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the history of painting, countless nods to mainstream media (It seems certain that a particular work is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). It would take time identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the works.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

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

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about such dynamics. In 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the body of a historical figure, a young African-American who was murdered by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of exploiting black death for her own gain. A protester demonstrated against the painting each day, and some demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist painting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the biennial. It was the peak of the recent social conflicts, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. Looking back now, in a society more divided, simplified and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But everything she’s done since exists in its shadow. She inevitably came out of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she continues to practice in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical art at the highest level.