🔗 Share this article

Dana Schutz smothers her canvases in thick gobs of viscous pigment. This first proper London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but some big messages are smuggled through 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 texture, application, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s plenty to keep you going for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, symbolic visuals that really makes the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

The works in the first gallery are full of giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. In one depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and creating a path of debris in their wake. A different work presents a person given a huge mask in some bizarre ceremony before a horde of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to read any of this as social commentary, as observation on the state of the US, on societal splits and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to waste.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to shift her focus to the people in power, instead of 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 couple console each other in a landscape strewn with dead bodies, and a woman, perhaps the artist, rests unclothed, desolate and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, covered in references. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, countless nods to mainstream media (It seems certain that a particular work 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 littered the works.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, complex and allegorical invites to analysis. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are two relatively clear themes: the people in power, and the public that they provoke.

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 murdered by two white men in a southern state in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. A protester picketed the work daily, and others demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of black pain was the major headline of the biennial. It was the peak of the late 2010s culture wars, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a world more divided, simplified and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get upset at this emotional, mournful painting.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her career, and the artist likely aims to move on. But everything she’s done since exists in its shadow. She inevitably came out of that experience a transformed creator. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical art at the highest level.