🔗 Share this article

The American painter cakes her canvases in heavy layers of gooey paint. Her inaugural London exhibition is a messy, exuberant celebration of her medium, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important figurative artists of her generation – is focused on surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. This is art for artists, real high-level art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks losing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s enough here to engage you for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the first gallery are full of giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. One piece depicts a collection of forms trudges mindlessly towards something off canvas, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of debris in their path. A different work presents a person receiving a large disguise in some bizarre ceremony in front of a horde of ugly supporters. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and angry, and mob mentality is turning everything to rubbish.

The Kiss by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, rather than the masses that follow 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 additional pieces a couple console each other in a landscape strewn with corpses, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, lies unclothed, forlorn and helpless in bed.

Inspirations and References

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, covered in allusions. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the history of painting, countless nods to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). It would take time spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the artworks.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to analysis. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Titian but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the people in power, and the public that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about that. Back in 2017, her painting Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was lynched by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. An activist demonstrated against the painting daily, and others called for it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent painting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of black pain was the major headline of the biennial. It was the peak of the late 2010s culture wars, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a society more divided, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her career, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But everything she’s done since exists in its influence. She inevitably emerged of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical art at the highest level.