🔗 Share this article

Dana Schutz cakes her canvases in thick gobs of gooey paint. Her inaugural London show is a messy, exuberant celebration of her medium, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as one of the most important figurative artists of her generation – is all about texture, application, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, real high-level aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks losing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s enough here to engage you for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that really makes the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the initial room are full of giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. In one depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event outside the frame, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of debris in their wake. A different work presents a person given a huge mask in some bizarre initiation ritual before a horde of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to interpret these as social commentary, as observation on America’s condition, on how society is divided and furious, and mob mentality is turning everything to waste.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the people in power, rather than the masses that support them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a man in green recline in golden chairs – while in other works a pair console each other in a scene strewn with dead bodies, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, lies unclothed, desolate and helpless in bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, covered in allusions. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the festive bizarre elements of James Ensor, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the history of painting, numerous references to pop culture (It seems certain that a particular work is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the works.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to analysis. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct themes: the ruling class, and the crowds that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about such dynamics. In 2017, her painting a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the body of a historical figure, a young African-American who was lynched by two white men in a southern state in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her own gain. A protester picketed the painting daily, and some demanded it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent painting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of black pain was the major headline of the biennial. It was the peak of the recent culture wars, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a society increasingly polarized, simplified and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get upset at this emotional, mournful painting.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But everything she’s done since exists in its influence. She unavoidably emerged of that ordeal a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical art at the top tier.