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Dana Schutz cakes her canvases in thick gobs of viscous pigment. Her inaugural London show is a messy, exuberant celebration of her material, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as a leading painters of her era – is focused on texture, application, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, real high-level art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy losing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s enough here to engage you for a while. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

The works in the first gallery are full of enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. One piece depicts a collection of forms trudges mindlessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and creating a path of trash in their path. In another presents a figure receiving a large disguise in an odd initiation ritual before a horde of ugly supporters. It’s easy to read any of this as social commentary, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and angry, and mob mentality is transforming all to waste.

The Kiss by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the people in power, rather than the crowds that support them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a man in green sit back in gilded seats – while in other works a pair comfort one another in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, lies unclothed, forlorn and powerless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, filled with references. You’ll find 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. She includes nods on the history of painting, countless nods to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a depiction of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David 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 analysis. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are two relatively clear themes: the people in power, and the public that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about that. Back in 2017, her painting a titled piece – 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. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. An activist demonstrated against the work each day, and others demanded it to be removed. A white artist painting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of black pain was the biggest story of the biennial. This marked the height of the late 2010s social conflicts, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a world more divided, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get angry at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

It could have ruined her professional life, and the artist likely aims to move on. But all her subsequent work now exists in its shadow. She unavoidably came out of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political painting at the highest level.