🔗 Share this article

Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. Her inaugural London exhibition is a messy, exuberant celebration of her material, but significant themes are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Her method – earning her acclaim as one of the most important figurative artists of her era – is focused on texture, application, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, real high-level aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks losing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, there’s plenty to engage you for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that really makes the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the initial room are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. One piece shows a collection of forms trudges mindlessly towards something outside the frame, waving hands and leaving a trail of debris in their wake. A different work presents a person given a large disguise in some bizarre initiation ritual in front of a horde of ugly supporters. It’s easy to interpret these as social commentary, as observation on America’s condition, on how society is divided and angry, and mob mentality is turning everything to waste.

The Kiss by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, instead of the crowds that support them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a man in green recline in gilded seats – while in additional pieces a couple comfort one another in a landscape filled with corpses, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, lies unclothed, desolate and powerless in bed.

Inspirations and References

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, covered in references. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the history of painting, countless nods to mainstream media (It seems certain that one painting is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the works.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, complex and allegorical invites to analysis. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the people in power, and the public that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about such dynamics. Back in 2017, her painting Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the body of Emmett Till, a young African-American who was murdered by two white men in a southern state in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. An activist picketed the painting daily, and some called for it to be removed. A white artist depicting – perhaps compassionately – a image of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the event. It was the peak of the late 2010s culture wars, a time that featured infighting even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a society increasingly polarized, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her professional life, and the artist likely aims to move on. But all her subsequent work since exists in its shadow. She unavoidably emerged of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical painting at the top tier.