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Dana Schutz smothers her canvases in heavy layers of viscous pigment. Her first proper London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but significant themes are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Her method – earning her acclaim as a leading painters of her generation – is focused on texture, application, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, there’s plenty to engage you for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the first gallery are full of enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. In one shows a group of figures stomps senselessly toward an event off canvas, waving hands and leaving a trail of trash in their wake. A different work presents a figure given a large disguise in an odd initiation ritual in front of a horde of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to read any of this as political, as commentary on America’s condition, on how society is divided and furious, and mob mentality is turning everything to rubbish.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the people in power, instead of the crowds that support them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a man in green sit back in golden chairs – whereas in additional pieces a couple comfort one another in a scene strewn with dead bodies, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, rests unclothed, desolate and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, filled with allusions. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the history of painting, numerous references to mainstream media (It seems certain that a particular work is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the artworks.

A Model by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to analysis. It seems like one is tested on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the people in power, and the public that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about such dynamics. In 2017, her painting Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of a historical figure, a black teenager who was murdered by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. An activist demonstrated against the work each day, and others demanded it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent painting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of African-American suffering was the major headline of the event. It was the peak of the late 2010s culture wars, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a society increasingly polarized, simplified and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get angry at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

It could have ruined her career, and the artist likely aims to move on. But all her subsequent work now exists in its shadow. She unavoidably emerged of that ordeal a changed artist. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical art at the highest level.