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Dana Schutz cakes her canvases in heavy layers of gooey paint. Her inaugural London show is a messy, exuberant celebration of her medium, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as one of the most important painters of her era – is all about texture, application, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, 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 long time. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that really makes the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the initial room are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. One piece shows a collection of forms trudges mindlessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of debris in their wake. A different work features a person given a large disguise in an odd ceremony in front of a horde of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to read any of this as social commentary, as commentary on the state of the US, on how society is divided and furious, and crowd psychology is turning everything to waste.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to shift her focus to the people in power, rather than the masses that follow them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a man in green recline in golden chairs – while in other works a pair console each other in a landscape strewn with corpses, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, lies naked, forlorn and helpless in a bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, filled with references. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. There are riffs 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). You could spend hours identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the artworks.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to analysis. It seems like one is tested on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are two relatively clear themes: the ruling class, and the crowds that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

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 murdered by racist perpetrators in a southern state in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of exploiting black death for her own gain. An activist picketed the painting each day, and some demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of black pain was the major headline of the biennial. This marked the height of the late 2010s social conflicts, a period that featured infighting 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 people had the time to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her professional life, and the artist likely aims to progress. But all her subsequent work since exists in its shadow. She unavoidably came out of that experience a changed artist. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she continues to practice in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political painting at the highest level.