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The American painter cakes her paintings in thick gobs of gooey paint. Her inaugural London show is a messy, exuberant tribute of her material, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Her method – earning her acclaim as a leading painters of her era – is focused on texture, application, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s enough here to engage you for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that really makes the artworks resonate.

Works in the First Gallery

The works in the first gallery are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. One piece depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly towards something outside the frame, waving hands and creating a path of debris in their wake. In another features a figure receiving a huge mask in some bizarre initiation ritual in front of a horde of ugly supporters. It’s easy to read any of this as political, as commentary on the state of the US, on how society is divided and angry, and crowd psychology is transforming all to rubbish.

An Embrace by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to shift her focus to the people in power, rather than the masses that support them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a green-clad man sit back in golden chairs – whereas in additional pieces a couple console each other in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, lies unclothed, desolate and helpless in bed.

Inspirations and References

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, filled with allusions. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the art historical tradition, numerous references to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a portrait of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the artworks.

A Model by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical invites to analysis. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Titian but, for my money, there are two relatively clear themes: the ruling class, and the crowds that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about such dynamics. In 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of a historical figure, a young African-American who was lynched by two white men in Mississippi in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of exploiting black death for her own gain. A protester picketed the work each day, and some called for it to be removed. An artist of European descent painting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the biennial. This marked the height of the late 2010s culture wars, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a society more divided, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get angry at this emotional, mournful artwork.

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 inevitably came out of that experience a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical art at the highest level.