🔗 Share this article

Dana Schutz smothers her paintings in thick gobs of viscous pigment. Her inaugural London show is a messy, exuberant tribute of her medium, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you manage to uncover 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 texture, application, hue and substance. This is art for artists, real high-level aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s enough here to engage you for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, symbolic visuals that really makes the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the first gallery are full of giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. One piece shows a group of figures stomps senselessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and leaving a trail of debris in their path. A different work presents a figure given a large disguise in an odd initiation ritual before a horde of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to read any of this as political, as commentary on the state of the US, on how society is divided and furious, and mob mentality is turning everything to rubbish.

An Embrace by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the people in power, instead of the crowds that follow them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a green-clad man sit back in golden chairs – while in additional pieces a couple comfort one another in a landscape filled with corpses, and a woman, perhaps the artist, lies unclothed, forlorn and helpless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, filled with allusions. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the history of painting, countless nods to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a portrait of a cartoon character from an animated series). It would take time identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the works.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to interpretation. It seems like one is tested on the symbolism of a Titian but, in my view, there are two relatively clear themes: the people in power, and the crowds that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about that. In 2017, her painting Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was lynched by two white men in a southern state in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy 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 work daily, and others called for it to be destroyed. A white artist painting – perhaps compassionately – a image of black pain was the major headline of the biennial. This marked the height of the recent social conflicts, a time that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a society more divided, simplified and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful painting.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But all her subsequent work since exists in its influence. She unavoidably came out of that experience a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical painting at the top tier.