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The American painter smothers her paintings in heavy layers of viscous pigment. This first proper London show is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Her method – which has seen her lauded as a leading figurative artists of her era – is all about surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s plenty to keep you going for a while. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that really makes the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the initial room are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. One piece shows a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event outside the frame, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their path. In another presents a figure receiving a huge mask in an odd ceremony before a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to interpret these as political, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and furious, and crowd psychology is turning everything to waste.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, rather than the masses that support them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a green-clad man sit back in gilded seats – whereas in additional pieces a pair comfort one another in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, rests naked, forlorn and powerless in a bed.

Inspirations and References

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, filled with references. 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 big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, countless nods to mainstream media (It seems certain that one painting is a depiction of a cartoon character from an animated series). You could spend hours spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the works.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to analysis. 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.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about such dynamics. In 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of a historical figure, a young African-American who was lynched by racist perpetrators in a southern state in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. An activist picketed the work daily, and others called for it to be removed. 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 social conflicts, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a society increasingly polarized, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But everything she’s done since exists in its shadow. She inevitably came out of that experience a changed artist. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical painting at the top tier.