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The American painter cakes her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. Her inaugural London show is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute of her material, but some big messages are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as one of the most important figurative artists of her era – is all about texture, application, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, real high-level 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 Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that truly drives the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the initial room are full of giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. In one shows a collection of forms trudges mindlessly towards something outside the frame, waving hands and leaving a trail of trash in their wake. In another features a person given a large disguise in some bizarre initiation ritual in front of a horde of unattractive followers. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as commentary on America’s condition, on how society is divided and angry, and mob mentality is turning everything to waste.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the people in power, rather than the masses that support them. Mysterious forms stuff their mouths with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a green-clad man recline in gilded seats – whereas in other works a pair console each other in a scene filled with corpses, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, rests naked, forlorn and helpless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, filled with allusions. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the history of painting, countless nods to mainstream media (It seems certain that a particular work is a portrait of a cartoon character from an animated series). You could spend hours 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, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to interpretation. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Titian but, in my view, there are two relatively clear narratives: the ruling class, and the public that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about such dynamics. Back in 2017, her painting a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the body of a historical figure, 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 displayed at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. A protester demonstrated against the work each day, and some called for it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent depicting – perhaps compassionately – a image of black pain was the biggest story of the event. This marked the height of the late 2010s culture wars, a time that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a society increasingly polarized, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get angry at this emotional, mournful painting.

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 changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical art at the highest level.