🔗 Share this article

Dana Schutz smothers her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. This inaugural London show is a messy, exuberant celebration of her material, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as a leading painters of her era – is focused on surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s enough here to keep you going for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that really makes the artworks resonate.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the initial room are full of enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. In one shows a group of figures trudges mindlessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of debris in their wake. In another presents a figure receiving a large disguise in some bizarre ceremony before a horde of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to interpret these as political, as commentary on America’s condition, on societal splits and furious, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to redirect attention to the people in power, rather than the crowds that support them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a green-clad man recline in gilded seats – whereas in additional pieces a pair console each other in a scene filled with corpses, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, rests naked, forlorn and powerless in bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, covered in references. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, numerous references to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to analysis. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are two relatively clear themes: the people in power, and the public that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about that. In 2017, her painting Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of a historical figure, a black teenager who was murdered by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. An activist picketed the painting each day, and others demanded 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. It was the peak of the recent culture wars, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. Looking back now, in a world increasingly polarized, simplified and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time 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 progress. But all her subsequent work now exists in its shadow. She inevitably came out of that experience a transformed creator. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical painting at the top tier.