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The American painter cakes her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. Her inaugural London show is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her material, but some big messages are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as a leading painters of her era – is focused on texture, application, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, real high-level aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy losing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s plenty to keep you going for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that really makes the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the first gallery are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. One piece depicts a group of figures trudges mindlessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and leaving a trail of trash in their wake. In another features a person receiving a large disguise in some bizarre ceremony before a horde of ugly supporters. It’s easy to interpret these as social commentary, as commentary on the state of the US, on societal splits and furious, and crowd psychology is turning everything to waste.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to shift her focus to the people in power, rather than the crowds that support them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a man in green recline in gilded seats – whereas in other works a couple console each other in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, lies unclothed, forlorn and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, filled with allusions. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of James Ensor, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the art historical tradition, countless nods to mainstream media (It seems certain that one painting is a portrait 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 works.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic invites to interpretation. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Titian but, in my view, there are two relatively clear narratives: the ruling class, and the crowds that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about that. In 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of a historical figure, a young African-American who was murdered by racist perpetrators in a southern state 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 others demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – perhaps compassionately – a image of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the biennial. It was the peak 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 people had the time to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her career, and the artist likely aims to move on. But everything she’s done since exists in its shadow. She unavoidably emerged of that experience a changed artist. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political art at the top tier.