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Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in thick gobs of gooey paint. Her inaugural London show is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as one of the most important painters of her generation – is all about surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy losing yourself in layers of pigment 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 paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the initial room are full of enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. In one depicts a collection of forms trudges mindlessly toward an event off canvas, waving hands and creating a path of debris in their path. In another presents a person given a large disguise in an odd ceremony in front of a horde of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to read any of this as social commentary, as commentary on America’s condition, on how society is divided and furious, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

An Embrace by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the people in power, instead of the masses that support them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a green-clad man recline in gilded seats – whereas in additional pieces a couple console each other in a scene strewn with corpses, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, rests unclothed, desolate 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 pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the history of painting, numerous references to mainstream media (It seems certain that a particular work is a portrait of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the works.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to interpretation. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are two relatively clear narratives: the ruling class, and the crowds that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about such dynamics. Back in 2017, her painting Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of Emmett Till, a young African-American who was lynched by two white men in Mississippi in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. An activist demonstrated against the painting each day, and others demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – perhaps compassionately – a image of black pain was the biggest story of the event. This marked the height of the recent culture wars, 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 more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get angry at this heartfelt, sorrowful painting.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her career, and the artist likely aims to progress. But all her subsequent work now exists in its influence. She inevitably came out of that experience a changed artist. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical painting at the top tier.