🔗 Share this article

The American painter cakes her paintings in heavy layers of viscous pigment. Her inaugural London show is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute of her medium, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Her method – earning her acclaim as one of the most important figurative artists of her era – is focused on surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy losing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s plenty to engage you for a long time. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the initial room are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. One piece shows a group of figures trudges mindlessly towards something outside the frame, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their path. In another features a figure receiving a large disguise in an odd initiation ritual in front of a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy to interpret these as social commentary, as observation on the state of the US, on how society is divided and angry, and crowd psychology is transforming all to waste.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to shift her focus to the people in power, instead of the masses that support them. Mysterious forms stuff their mouths with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a green-clad man recline in golden chairs – while in additional pieces a pair comfort one another in a landscape strewn with dead bodies, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, lies naked, desolate and helpless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, filled with allusions. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the festive bizarre elements of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the history of painting, countless nods to pop culture (It seems certain that a particular work is a depiction of a cartoon character from an animated series). You could spend hours identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical invites to analysis. It seems like one is tested on the symbolism of a Titian but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct themes: the ruling class, and the public that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about such dynamics. 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 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. A protester picketed the work daily, and others demanded it to be removed. A white artist depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of black pain was the major headline of the event. It was the peak of the recent culture wars, a time that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. Looking back now, in a society increasingly polarized, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But all her subsequent work since exists in its shadow. She unavoidably emerged of that experience a transformed creator. 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.