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Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in thick gobs of gooey paint. Her first proper London exhibition is a messy, exuberant tribute of her medium, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as a leading figurative artists of her generation – is focused on texture, application, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, real high-level aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy losing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s enough here to keep you going for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the initial room are full of enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. One piece shows a collection of forms trudges mindlessly towards something off canvas, waving hands and creating a path of debris in their wake. A different work features a figure receiving a huge mask in some bizarre ceremony in front of a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to interpret these as social commentary, as observation on the state of the US, on how society is divided and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

An Embrace by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, rather than the masses that support them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a green-clad man recline in gilded seats – while in additional pieces a couple comfort one another in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, rests unclothed, forlorn and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, covered in references. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, countless nods to mainstream media (It seems certain that a particular work is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). You could spend hours spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the artworks.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical invites to interpretation. I feel as if one is tested on the meaning of a Titian but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the ruling class, and the crowds that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about that. Back in 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of Emmett Till, a young African-American who was murdered by racist perpetrators in a southern state in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. A protester demonstrated against the work each day, and others demanded it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent depicting – perhaps compassionately – a image of African-American suffering 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 identical team. Looking back now, in a society increasingly polarized, simplified and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get angry at this heartfelt, sorrowful painting.

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 influence. She inevitably emerged of that ordeal a changed artist. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical art at the highest level.