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The American painter cakes her canvases in thick gobs of gooey paint. This inaugural London show is a messy, exuberant tribute of her material, but some big messages are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important figurative artists of her generation – is all about texture, application, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks losing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s plenty to keep you going for a while. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that really makes the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the first gallery are full of giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. One piece depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and creating a path of trash in their path. In another presents a person receiving a huge mask in an odd initiation ritual before a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to interpret these as social commentary, as commentary on the state of the US, on societal splits and furious, and crowd psychology is transforming all to waste.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, instead of the masses that follow them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a green-clad man recline in golden chairs – while in additional pieces a pair comfort one another in a scene filled with corpses, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, lies unclothed, desolate and helpless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, filled with allusions. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the large-headed oddities of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, countless nods to mainstream media (It seems certain that one painting is a depiction of a cartoon character from an animated series). You could spend hours spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the works.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to interpretation. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are two relatively clear themes: the people in power, and the crowds that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about that. In 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of a historical figure, a young African-American who was murdered by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. An activist demonstrated against the work each day, and some demanded it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent painting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of African-American suffering was the major headline of the biennial. This marked the height of the late 2010s culture wars, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a world increasingly polarized, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful painting.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her career, and the artist likely aims to progress. But all her subsequent work now exists in its influence. 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 art at the highest level.