The Artist Dana Schutz Exhibition Overview: An Orgy of Thick Paint from the Painter Who Shocked New York

The American painter cakes her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. This first proper London exhibition is a messy, exuberant celebration of her medium, but significant themes are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important figurative artists of her era – is focused on texture, application, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, there’s enough here to engage you for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that really makes the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the first gallery are full of giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. One piece depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event outside the frame, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of trash in their path. A different work features a figure given a large disguise in some bizarre initiation ritual in front of a horde of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to read any of this as social commentary, as commentary on America’s condition, on societal splits and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, 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 man in green recline in golden chairs – whereas in other works a couple console each other in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, rests unclothed, desolate and helpless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, covered in allusions. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, countless nods to pop culture (It seems certain that one painting 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 littered the works.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to interpretation. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Titian but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the ruling class, and the public that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about that. In 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the body of a historical figure, a black teenager who was murdered by racist perpetrators in a southern state in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her own gain. A protester picketed the painting each day, and some demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of black pain was the major headline of the event. It was the peak of the late 2010s culture wars, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a world increasingly polarized, simplified and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get upset at this emotional, mournful painting.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But everything she’s done now exists in its influence. She unavoidably emerged of that ordeal a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political painting at the highest level.