🔗 Share this article

Dana Schutz smothers her paintings in thick gobs of gooey paint. Her inaugural London show is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her material, but some big messages are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important figurative artists of her era – is focused on surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks losing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s plenty to engage you for a while. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that really makes the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the initial room are full of enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. One piece shows a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and creating a path of trash in their wake. In another features a person receiving a large disguise in some bizarre ceremony before a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s easy to read any of this as social commentary, as observation on America’s condition, on how society is divided and furious, and crowd psychology is turning everything to waste.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the people in power, instead of the masses that support them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a green-clad man recline in golden chairs – whereas in other works a pair comfort one another in a scene filled with dead bodies, and a woman, perhaps the artist, lies naked, desolate and powerless in a bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, filled with references. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the art historical tradition, countless nods to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). It would take time spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the artworks.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic invites to analysis. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are two relatively clear narratives: the people in power, and the crowds that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about such dynamics. In 2017, her painting Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of a historical figure, a young African-American who was murdered by two white men in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her own gain. A protester demonstrated against the work daily, and some demanded it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent painting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of African-American suffering was the major headline of the biennial. This marked the height of the late 2010s culture wars, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a society increasingly polarized, simplified and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get upset at this emotional, mournful painting.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But everything she’s done since exists in its influence. She unavoidably emerged of that experience a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political art at the highest level.