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The American painter smothers her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. Her inaugural London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her material, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as one of the most important figurative artists of her era – is all about texture, application, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, there’s enough here to engage you for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the initial room are full of enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. In one depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly towards something outside the frame, brandishing fists and creating a path of trash in their wake. A different work features a figure receiving a huge mask in some bizarre initiation ritual in front of a horde of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to read any of this as political, as observation on the state of the US, on how society is divided and angry, and crowd psychology is transforming all to rubbish.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, rather than the masses that support them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a green-clad man sit back in gilded seats – whereas in other works a pair console each other in a scene filled with corpses, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, rests unclothed, forlorn and helpless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, covered in allusions. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, countless nods to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). You could spend hours identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the artworks.

A Model by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic invites to analysis. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the meaning 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.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about that. In 2017, her painting Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. An activist demonstrated against the work each day, and others demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of black pain was the major headline of the event. This marked the height of the late 2010s culture wars, a time that featured infighting even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a world more divided, simplified and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get upset at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her career, and the artist likely aims to move on. But everything she’s done since exists in its shadow. She inevitably came out of that experience a changed artist. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical painting at the highest level.