🔗 Share this article

Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. This inaugural London show is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute of her medium, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you manage to uncover them.

Schutz's Approach

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 aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks losing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s enough here to engage you for a long time. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Works in the First Gallery

The works in the first gallery are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. One piece shows a group of figures trudges mindlessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and leaving a trail of trash in their path. A different work features a figure receiving a huge mask in an odd ceremony before a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s easy to read any of this as social commentary, as observation on America’s condition, on how society is divided and angry, and crowd psychology is transforming all to rubbish.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the people in power, instead of the crowds that support them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a man in green sit back in golden chairs – while in additional pieces a couple console each other in a landscape strewn with dead bodies, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, rests unclothed, desolate and helpless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, covered in references. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the art historical tradition, countless nods to mainstream media (It seems certain that a particular work is a depiction of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

A Model by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical invites to analysis. I feel as if one is tested on the symbolism of a Titian but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct themes: the people in power, and the crowds that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about such dynamics. In 2017, her painting a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of a historical figure, a young African-American who was murdered by racist perpetrators in a southern state in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of exploiting black death for her own gain. An activist picketed the work each day, and some called for it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent depicting – perhaps compassionately – a scene 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. In retrospect, in a world more divided, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get upset at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But all her subsequent work since exists in its influence. She inevitably emerged of that experience a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political painting at the top tier.