🔗 Share this article

Dana Schutz smothers her canvases in heavy layers of gooey paint. Her inaugural London show is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but significant themes are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as one of the most important painters of her generation – is all about surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks losing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, there’s enough here to engage you for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Works in the First Gallery

The works in the initial room are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. One piece depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly towards something off canvas, waving hands and creating a path of debris in their path. A different work presents a person given a huge mask in some bizarre ceremony in front of a horde of ugly supporters. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as commentary on America’s condition, on how society is divided and angry, and mob mentality is turning everything to rubbish.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, rather than the crowds that follow them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a green-clad man recline in gilded seats – while in additional pieces a pair comfort one another in a scene strewn with dead bodies, and a woman, perhaps the artist, lies naked, forlorn and powerless in a bed.

Inspirations and References

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, filled with allusions. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the art historical tradition, countless nods to pop culture (It seems certain that a particular work is a depiction of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the artworks.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to interpretation. It seems like one is tested on the meaning of a Titian but, for my money, there are two relatively clear themes: the people in power, and the public that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about that. In 2017, her painting a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the body of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. A protester demonstrated against the work daily, and others demanded it to be removed. A white artist painting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of African-American suffering was the major headline of the event. This marked the height of the recent culture wars, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. Looking back now, in a society more divided, simplified and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get angry at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

It could have ruined her career, and the artist likely aims to move on. But all her subsequent work since exists in its influence. She unavoidably came out of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political art at the highest level.