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The American painter smothers her paintings in thick gobs of viscous pigment. This inaugural London exhibition is a messy, exuberant tribute of her material, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – which has seen her lauded as a leading 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 immersing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s enough here to keep you going for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that really makes the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the first gallery are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. One piece shows a group of figures trudges mindlessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and leaving a trail of debris in their wake. A different work features a figure given a large disguise in some bizarre initiation ritual before a horde of unattractive followers. It’s easy to read any of this as social commentary, as commentary on America’s condition, on how society is divided and angry, and mob mentality is turning everything to waste.

The Kiss by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to redirect attention to the people in power, rather than the crowds that follow them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a man in green sit back in gilded seats – while in additional pieces a couple console each other in a landscape filled with corpses, and a woman, perhaps the artist, rests naked, desolate and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, filled with references. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the history of painting, numerous references to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

A Model by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic invites to analysis. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct themes: the ruling class, and the public that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about that. In 2017, her painting a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of Emmett Till, a young African-American who was lynched by two white men in a southern state in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. An activist picketed the painting daily, and others demanded it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent depicting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the biennial. It was the peak of the recent culture wars, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a society increasingly polarized, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get upset at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But all her subsequent work now exists in its influence. She inevitably came out of that experience a transformed creator. 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.