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Dana Schutz cakes her canvases in heavy layers of viscous pigment. Her inaugural London show is a messy, exuberant tribute of her medium, but significant themes are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Her method – earning her acclaim as a leading figurative artists of her generation – is focused on texture, application, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, real high-level aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, there’s plenty to engage you for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the initial room are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. One piece depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and creating a path of trash in their wake. A different work presents a figure receiving a large disguise in an odd ceremony before a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as commentary on the state of the US, on how society is divided and angry, and crowd psychology is transforming all to rubbish.

An Embrace by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the people in power, instead of the masses that follow them. Mysterious forms stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a green-clad man recline in gilded seats – whereas in additional pieces a couple comfort one another in a scene filled with corpses, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, lies unclothed, desolate and helpless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, covered in references. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, numerous references to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a depiction of a cartoon character from an animated series). You could spend hours spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the works.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic invites to interpretation. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct themes: the ruling class, and the public that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about such dynamics. Back in 2017, her painting a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of Emmett Till, a young African-American who was murdered by two white men in a southern state in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. An activist picketed the work each day, and others demanded it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent painting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the event. 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. Looking back now, in a society increasingly polarized, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her professional life, and the artist likely aims to progress. But everything she’s done since exists in its shadow. 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, gloopy and deeply political painting at the highest level.