🔗 Share this article

The American painter cakes her canvases in thick gobs of viscous pigment. Her first proper London show is a messy, exuberant celebration 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 – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important painters of her generation – is all about surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. This is art for artists, real high-level aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s plenty to keep you going for a long time. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, symbolic visuals that really makes the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the initial room are full of giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. One piece shows a group of figures trudges mindlessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their wake. A different work features a person given a huge mask in an odd ceremony before a horde of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to interpret these as social commentary, as commentary on the state of the US, on societal splits and furious, and crowd psychology is turning everything to waste.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, instead of the masses that follow them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a green-clad man sit back in gilded seats – whereas in additional pieces a pair console each other in a landscape strewn with dead bodies, and a woman, perhaps the artist, lies naked, desolate and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, covered in allusions. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the history of painting, countless nods to mainstream media (It seems certain that one painting is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time 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, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to interpretation. I feel as if one is tested on the meaning of a Titian but, in my view, there are two relatively clear narratives: the ruling class, and the crowds that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about such dynamics. Back in 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the body of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered by two white men in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. A protester picketed the painting each day, and others demanded it to be removed. An artist of European descent painting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of African-American suffering was the major headline of the event. It was the peak of the recent social conflicts, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. Looking back now, in a society more divided, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get upset at this emotional, mournful painting.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her career, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But everything she’s done since exists in its influence. She unavoidably came out of that experience a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical painting at the highest level.