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Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in thick gobs of gooey paint. Her first proper London show is a messy, exuberant celebration of her material, but significant themes are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as one of the most important painters of her era – 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 losing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s plenty to keep you going for a while. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the first gallery are full of giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. In one depicts a collection of forms trudges mindlessly towards something outside the frame, waving hands and creating a path of debris in their path. A different work features a figure given a large disguise in some bizarre ceremony before a horde of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to read any of this as political, as observation on the state of the US, on societal splits and angry, and mob mentality is turning everything to rubbish.

The Kiss by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, instead of the crowds that support them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a man in green sit back in gilded seats – while in additional pieces a pair console each other in a scene filled with corpses, and a woman, perhaps the artist, rests naked, desolate and helpless in a bed.

Inspirations and References

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, covered in allusions. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the art historical tradition, numerous references to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the works.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to interpretation. I feel as if 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 crowds that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about such dynamics. In 2017, her painting a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the body of a historical figure, a young African-American 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 own gain. An activist picketed the work daily, and others called for it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent depicting – perhaps compassionately – a image of African-American suffering was the major headline of the biennial. It was the peak of the late 2010s social conflicts, a time that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a world increasingly polarized, simplified and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get angry at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her career, and the artist likely aims to progress. But everything she’s done since exists in its shadow. She unavoidably emerged of that ordeal a changed artist. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political art at the top tier.