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Dana Schutz smothers her canvases in heavy layers of gooey paint. This first proper London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but significant themes 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 painters of her generation – is all about surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, real high-level aesthetic geekery. 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, symbolic visuals that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the first gallery are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. In one shows a collection of forms stomps senselessly towards something off canvas, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of trash in their wake. In another presents a person given a huge mask in some bizarre ceremony in front of a horde of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to read any of this as social commentary, as observation on the state of the US, on societal splits and furious, and crowd psychology is transforming all to waste.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, rather than the masses that support them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a man in green recline in golden chairs – whereas in additional pieces a pair comfort one another in a scene filled with corpses, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, rests unclothed, forlorn and helpless in a bed.

Inspirations and References

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, covered in allusions. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation 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, numerous references to pop culture (It seems certain that a particular work is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). You could spend hours spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the works.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical invites to interpretation. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are two relatively clear themes: the ruling class, and the public that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about that. Back in 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of Emmett Till, a young African-American who was lynched by racist perpetrators in a southern state in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of exploiting black death for her own gain. An activist demonstrated against the work daily, and others demanded it to be removed. An artist of European descent painting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of African-American suffering was the major headline of the biennial. It was the peak of the late 2010s social conflicts, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. Looking back now, in a world increasingly polarized, simplified and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get angry at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her career, and the artist likely aims to move on. But everything she’s done since exists in its influence. She inevitably came out of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical art at the top tier.