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The American painter smothers her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. This first proper London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but significant themes are smuggled through 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 all about texture, application, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, there’s enough here to keep you going for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, symbolic visuals that really makes the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the first gallery are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. In one depicts a group of figures stomps senselessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and creating a path of trash in their wake. 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 social commentary, as commentary on America’s condition, on how society is divided and angry, and mob mentality is transforming all to rubbish.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, instead of the masses that support them. Mysterious forms stuff their mouths with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a green-clad man sit back in golden chairs – whereas in additional pieces a pair comfort one another in a landscape strewn with corpses, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, lies naked, desolate and powerless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, filled with references. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the history of painting, numerous references to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

A Model 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 symbolism of a Titian but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct themes: the people in power, and the public that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know 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 lynched by racist perpetrators in a southern state in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. A protester demonstrated against the painting daily, and some demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist painting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of African-American suffering was the major headline of the event. This marked the height of the recent 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 angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get angry at this heartfelt, sorrowful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

It could have ruined her career, and the artist likely aims to progress. But everything she’s done since exists in its shadow. She unavoidably emerged of that ordeal a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical painting at the top tier.