🔗 Share this article

Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. This first proper London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her material, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you manage to uncover them.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – which has seen her lauded as a leading figurative artists of her generation – is all about surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, real high-level aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks losing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s enough here to engage you for a long time. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that really makes the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

The works in the initial room are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. One piece shows a collection of forms trudges mindlessly toward an event off canvas, waving hands and creating a path of debris in their path. A different work features a figure given a huge mask in an odd initiation ritual before a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy to interpret these as social commentary, as commentary on the state of the US, on societal splits and furious, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

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. Mysterious forms stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a man in green sit back in golden chairs – whereas in additional pieces a couple console each other in a landscape strewn with dead bodies, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, rests unclothed, desolate and powerless in bed.

Inspirations and References

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, filled with allusions. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the history of painting, countless nods to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). It would take time spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

A Model by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical invites to analysis. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct themes: the people in power, and the crowds that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about that. In 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of a historical figure, a young African-American who was murdered by two white men in a southern state in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of exploiting black death for her own gain. An activist picketed the work daily, and some called for it to be removed. A white artist painting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the event. It was the peak of the late 2010s social conflicts, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. Looking back now, in a society increasingly polarized, simplified and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get angry at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her career, and the artist likely aims to move on. But everything she’s done now exists in its shadow. She unavoidably emerged of that ordeal a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political art at the highest level.