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Dana Schutz cakes her canvases in thick gobs of viscous pigment. This inaugural London show is a messy, exuberant tribute of her medium, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you manage to uncover them.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important painters of her generation – is all about surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. 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 enough here to keep you going for a long time. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the first gallery are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. One piece shows a group of figures trudges mindlessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and creating a path of trash in their wake. A different work presents a person given a large disguise in an odd initiation ritual in front of a horde of ugly supporters. It’s easy to read any of this as political, as observation on the state of the US, on how society is divided and furious, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, rather than the crowds that support them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a man in green recline in golden chairs – while in additional pieces a pair comfort one another in a scene filled with corpses, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, rests unclothed, forlorn and helpless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, filled with references. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs 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 Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the art historical tradition, countless nods to mainstream media (It seems certain that a particular work is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

A Model by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to interpretation. I feel as if one is tested on the meaning of a Titian but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct themes: the people in power, and the public that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about such dynamics. Back in 2017, her painting Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of exploiting black death for her own gain. A protester picketed the work daily, and some called for it to be removed. An artist of European descent painting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of African-American suffering was the major headline of the biennial. It was the peak of the late 2010s culture wars, 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 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 career, and the artist likely aims to move on. But all her subsequent work since exists in its influence. She unavoidably came out of that experience a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political painting at the top tier.