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Dana Schutz smothers her canvases in thick gobs of viscous pigment. This inaugural London exhibition is a messy, exuberant celebration of her material, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you manage to uncover them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as one of the most important figurative artists of her era – is all about surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks losing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s enough here to keep you going for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, symbolic visuals that really makes the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the initial room are full of enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. In one depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and leaving a trail of debris in their wake. A different work features a figure receiving a huge mask in some bizarre initiation ritual before a horde of unattractive followers. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as commentary on America’s condition, on how society is divided and furious, and mob mentality is turning everything to waste.

An Embrace by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, instead of the masses that support them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a man in green sit back in golden chairs – whereas in other works a pair comfort one another in a scene filled with dead bodies, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, rests naked, forlorn and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, covered in allusions. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, numerous references to mainstream media (It seems certain that one painting is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). You could spend hours spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the works.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to analysis. It seems like one is tested on the meaning of a Titian but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the people in power, and the crowds that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about such dynamics. Back in 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered by two white men in a southern state in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. A protester picketed the painting each day, and some called for it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent depicting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of black pain was the biggest story of the event. It was the peak of the late 2010s social conflicts, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a world increasingly polarized, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get angry at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her career, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But all her subsequent work since exists in its influence. She inevitably emerged of that ordeal a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical art at the top tier.