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Dana Schutz cakes her canvases in heavy layers of viscous pigment. Her inaugural London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute of her material, but significant themes 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 figurative artists of her era – is all about texture, application, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s enough here to keep you going for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that really makes the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the first gallery are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. In one shows a group of figures stomps senselessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their wake. A different work features a figure receiving a large disguise in an odd initiation ritual in front of 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 crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, instead of the masses that support them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a green-clad man recline in gilded seats – whereas in other works a pair comfort one another in a landscape strewn with corpses, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, lies naked, forlorn and helpless in bed.

Inspirations and References

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, covered in references. There’s 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 big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the history of painting, countless nods to pop culture (It seems certain that a particular work is a depiction of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the works.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to analysis. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct themes: the people in power, and the crowds that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about that. In 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the body of a historical figure, a young African-American who was murdered by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her own gain. A protester picketed the work each day, and others demanded it to be removed. An artist of European descent depicting – perhaps compassionately – a image of black pain was the biggest story of the biennial. It was the peak of the recent culture wars, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. Looking back now, in a world more divided, simplified and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get angry at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

It could have ruined her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But everything she’s done since exists in its influence. She inevitably came out of that experience a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical art at the top tier.