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The American painter cakes her paintings in thick gobs of gooey paint. This inaugural London exhibition is a messy, exuberant tribute of her medium, but some big messages are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Her method – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important painters of her era – is all about texture, application, hue and substance. This is art for artists, 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 Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Works in the First Gallery

The works in the initial room are full of giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. In one depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly towards something off canvas, brandishing fists and creating a path of trash in their path. A different work features a person given a large disguise in some bizarre initiation ritual in front of a horde of unattractive followers. It’s easy to read any of this as social commentary, as observation on the state of the US, on societal splits and furious, and crowd psychology is transforming all to rubbish.

An Embrace by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the people in power, instead of the masses that follow them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a green-clad man recline in gilded seats – while in other works a couple comfort one another in a scene strewn with corpses, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, rests unclothed, desolate and powerless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, filled with references. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the history of painting, numerous references to mainstream media (It seems certain that a particular work is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time 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 interpretation. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are two relatively clear themes: the ruling class, and the public that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about such dynamics. In 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of a historical figure, a black teenager who was murdered by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. An activist picketed the painting each day, and some demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the event. This marked the height of the recent social conflicts, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. Looking back now, in a society increasingly polarized, simplified and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get angry at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her career, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But all her subsequent work now exists in its shadow. She unavoidably emerged of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political art at the highest level.