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The American painter cakes her canvases in heavy layers of gooey paint. This inaugural London show is a messy, exuberant celebration of her medium, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Her method – which has seen her lauded as a leading figurative artists of her era – is all about surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. This is art for artists, real high-level art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s enough here 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 roaring mobs. One piece depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of debris in their path. A different work features a figure given a huge mask in an odd ceremony before a horde of unattractive followers. It’s easy to read any of this as political, as observation on the state of the US, on how society is divided and furious, and mob mentality is turning everything to rubbish.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, rather than 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 – while in additional pieces a couple comfort one another in a scene filled with corpses, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, rests naked, desolate and helpless in a bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, covered in allusions. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the art historical tradition, numerous references to mainstream media (It seems certain that a particular work is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). It would take time spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the works.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to interpretation. I feel as if one is tested on the meaning of a Titian but, in my view, there are two relatively clear themes: the ruling class, and the public that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about such dynamics. Back in 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of Emmett Till, a young African-American who was murdered by racist perpetrators in a southern state in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her own gain. An activist demonstrated against the painting daily, and others demanded it to be removed. An artist of European descent depicting – perhaps compassionately – a image of black pain was the major headline 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 identical team. Looking back now, in a society increasingly polarized, simplified and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get upset at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her career, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But all her subsequent work now exists in its shadow. She inevitably came out of that experience a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she continues to practice in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical painting at the top tier.