🔗 Share this article

Dana Schutz smothers her canvases in thick gobs of viscous pigment. Her inaugural London show is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you manage to uncover them.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important figurative artists of her era – is all about texture, application, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s plenty to engage you for a long time. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that really makes the artworks resonate.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the first gallery are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. In one shows a collection of forms stomps senselessly towards something outside the frame, brandishing fists and creating a path of trash in their wake. In another presents a person receiving a huge mask in some bizarre ceremony before a horde of unattractive followers. It’s easy to read any of this as political, as observation on the state of the US, on societal splits and furious, and mob mentality is turning everything to waste.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to redirect attention to the people in power, instead of the crowds that support them. Mysterious forms stuff their mouths with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a green-clad man sit back in golden chairs – whereas in other works a couple comfort one another in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, lies unclothed, desolate and powerless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, covered in references. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the history of painting, countless nods to pop culture (It seems certain that a particular work is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the artworks.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to interpretation. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Titian but, for my money, there are two relatively clear narratives: the people in power, and the crowds that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about that. In 2017, her painting a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was lynched by two white men in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. An activist picketed the work daily, and others demanded it to be removed. An artist of European descent depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of black pain was the major headline 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. 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 painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her career, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But everything she’s done 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.