The Artist Dana Schutz Exhibition Overview: A Feast of Thick Paint from the Artist Who Outraged New York

The American painter 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 subtly embedded if you manage to uncover them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important painters of her generation – is all about texture, application, hue and substance. This is art for artists, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy losing yourself in coats of color 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.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the initial room are full of giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. One piece shows a group of figures stomps senselessly towards something off canvas, waving hands and creating a path of trash in their path. A different work presents a figure receiving a huge mask in some bizarre ceremony before a horde of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to interpret these as political, as observation on the state of the US, on how society is divided and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

The Kiss by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, instead of the masses that support them. Mysterious forms stuff their mouths with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a green-clad man sit back in gilded seats – while in additional pieces a couple console each other in a scene filled with dead bodies, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, lies unclothed, desolate and powerless in a bed.

Inspirations and References

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, covered in allusions. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the history of painting, numerous references to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a portrait of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the artworks.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, complex and allegorical invites to interpretation. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct themes: the people in power, and the crowds that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about such dynamics. In 2017, her painting Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of a historical figure, a black teenager who was lynched by racist perpetrators in a southern state in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. An activist demonstrated against the work each day, and some 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. It was the peak of the recent culture wars, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a society increasingly polarized, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get upset at this emotional, mournful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her career, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But all her subsequent work since exists in its influence. She unavoidably came out of that experience a transformed creator. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political painting at the highest level.