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Dana Schutz cakes her canvases in thick gobs of gooey paint. Her inaugural London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute of her medium, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you manage to uncover them.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – earning her acclaim as one of the most important painters of her generation – is focused on texture, application, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy losing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s enough here to engage you for a long time. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, symbolic visuals that really makes the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the first gallery are full of giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. One piece shows a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their wake. A different work features a figure given a large disguise in an odd ceremony before a horde of unattractive followers. It’s easy to read any of this as social commentary, as observation on the state of the US, on societal splits and furious, and mob mentality is turning everything to rubbish.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the people in power, rather than the crowds that support them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a man in green sit back in gilded seats – while in other works a pair comfort one another in a scene strewn with corpses, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, lies naked, forlorn and helpless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, covered in allusions. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the history of painting, countless nods to mainstream media (It seems certain that a particular work is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). You could spend hours spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to interpretation. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are two relatively clear themes: the people in power, and the public that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about that. Back in 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of a historical figure, a black teenager who was lynched by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of exploiting black death for her own gain. An activist picketed the work each day, and some called for it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the event. It was the peak of the recent social conflicts, a period 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 feels almost quaint that people had the time to get angry at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her career, and the artist likely aims to progress. But all her subsequent work since exists in its influence. She inevitably emerged of that ordeal a changed artist. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical painting at the top tier.