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Dana Schutz smothers her canvases in heavy layers of gooey paint. This inaugural London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute of her material, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as a leading painters of her era – is all about surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. This is art for artists, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy losing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s plenty to engage you for a while. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the first gallery are full of enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. One piece depicts a group of figures stomps senselessly towards something outside the frame, waving hands and creating a path of trash in their path. A different work features a person receiving a huge mask in some bizarre ceremony before a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to interpret these as social commentary, as commentary on America’s condition, on societal splits and angry, and mob mentality is turning everything to rubbish.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, instead of the masses that follow them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a man in green recline in gilded seats – while in additional pieces a pair comfort one another in a landscape strewn with dead bodies, and a woman, perhaps the artist, lies naked, desolate and powerless in a bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, filled with allusions. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the history of painting, countless nods to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the works.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to analysis. I feel as if one is tested on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct themes: the ruling class, and the crowds that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about such dynamics. In 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the body of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered by two white men in Mississippi in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of exploiting black death for her own gain. A protester demonstrated against the work daily, and others demanded it to be destroyed. 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 recent culture wars, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a world increasingly polarized, simplified and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get angry at this heartfelt, sorrowful painting.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But everything she’s done now exists in its influence. She unavoidably came out of that experience a transformed creator. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political painting at the top tier.