🔗 Share this article

The American painter cakes her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. Her inaugural London exhibition is a messy, exuberant tribute of her material, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

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

Works in the First Gallery

The works in the initial room are full of giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. In one depicts a group of figures trudges mindlessly toward an event off canvas, waving hands and creating a path of trash in their path. In another presents a person receiving a huge mask in some bizarre ceremony before a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy to read any of this as social commentary, as commentary on America’s condition, on how society is divided and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, instead of the masses that support them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a man in green sit back in gilded seats – whereas in other works a couple console each other in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a woman, perhaps the artist, rests naked, desolate and helpless in bed.

Inspirations and References

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, covered in allusions. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, 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 pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a depiction 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 works.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to analysis. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct themes: the ruling class, and the crowds that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about that. In 2017, her painting a titled piece – 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 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 daily, and others called for it to be destroyed. A white artist painting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of black pain was the biggest story of the event. This marked the height of the late 2010s social conflicts, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a world increasingly polarized, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get angry at this emotional, mournful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her career, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But everything she’s done now exists in its shadow. She unavoidably came out of that experience a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political painting at the top tier.