🔗 Share this article

The American painter cakes her canvases in thick gobs of viscous pigment. This first proper London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute of her medium, but significant themes are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important painters of her era – is focused on surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks losing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s plenty to keep you going for a while. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, symbolic visuals that truly drives the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the first gallery are full of enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. In one depicts a collection of forms trudges mindlessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their wake. In another presents a person receiving a large disguise in some bizarre ceremony in front of a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s easy 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.

The Kiss by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the people in power, instead of the crowds that follow them. Mysterious forms stuff their mouths with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a green-clad man recline in golden chairs – whereas in additional pieces a pair console each other in a scene strewn with dead bodies, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, lies naked, forlorn and powerless in bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, filled with allusions. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the history of painting, countless nods to pop culture (It seems certain that one painting is a depiction of a cartoon character 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 Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to interpretation. It seems like one is tested on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct themes: the people in power, and the crowds that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about that. Back in 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body 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 a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. An activist demonstrated against the work each day, and others called for it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent depicting – perhaps compassionately – a image of black pain was the major headline of the event. It was the peak of the late 2010s culture wars, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a world increasingly polarized, simplified and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get angry at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

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 unavoidably came out of that ordeal a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical painting at the top tier.