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Dana Schutz smothers her canvases in thick gobs of gooey paint. This first proper London show is a messy, exuberant tribute of her material, but significant themes are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Her method – earning her acclaim as one of the most important figurative artists of her generation – is focused on surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. This is art for artists, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s enough here to keep you going for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the initial room are full of enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. One piece depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event off canvas, waving hands and creating a path of trash in their wake. A different work features a person given a huge mask in some bizarre initiation ritual before a horde of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to interpret these as social commentary, as commentary on the state of the US, on societal splits and furious, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the people in power, rather than the masses that support them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a man in green sit back in golden chairs – while in additional pieces a couple console each other in a landscape filled with corpses, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, lies unclothed, forlorn and powerless in bed.

Inspirations and References

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, filled with allusions. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements 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 one painting is a portrait of a cartoon character from an animated series). You could spend hours identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the works.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

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

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about such dynamics. In 2017, her painting Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the body of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of exploiting black death for her own gain. A protester demonstrated against the work each day, and others called for it to be removed. An artist of European descent depicting – perhaps compassionately – a image of black pain was the biggest story of the biennial. This marked the height of the late 2010s social conflicts, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a world more divided, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get angry at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her professional life, and the artist likely aims to move on. But everything she’s done since exists in its influence. She unavoidably emerged of that ordeal a transformed creator. 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.