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Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in heavy layers of viscous pigment. Her inaugural London show is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute of her medium, but some big messages are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Her method – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important painters of her era – is all about texture, application, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, real high-level aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks losing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, there’s enough here to engage you for a long time. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the first gallery are full of enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. One piece depicts a group of figures trudges mindlessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and creating a path of trash in their wake. A different work presents a person given a large disguise in some bizarre ceremony before a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to interpret these as political, as observation on America’s condition, on how society is divided and angry, and crowd psychology is transforming all to waste.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, rather than 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 sit back in golden chairs – while in other works a pair console each other in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, rests naked, forlorn and powerless in a bed.

Inspirations and References

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, filled with allusions. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the history of painting, countless nods to mainstream media (It seems certain that a particular work is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the artworks.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to interpretation. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the ruling class, and the public that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about that. Back in 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of Emmett Till, a young African-American who was lynched by two white men in a southern state in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. A protester picketed the painting daily, and others called for it to be removed. An artist of European descent depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of black pain was the major headline of the biennial. This marked the height of the recent social conflicts, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a world increasingly polarized, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get upset at this emotional, mournful artwork.

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 shadow. She inevitably emerged of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical art at the highest level.