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Dana Schutz smothers her canvases in thick gobs of gooey paint. Her inaugural London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her material, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important painters of her era – is focused on texture, application, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy losing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s enough here to keep you going for a while. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that really makes the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the initial room are full of enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. One piece depicts a collection of forms trudges mindlessly towards something off canvas, waving hands and leaving a trail of trash in their path. A different work presents a person receiving a huge mask in an odd initiation ritual before a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as observation on the state of the US, on societal splits and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, instead of the crowds that follow them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a green-clad man recline in golden chairs – whereas in additional pieces a couple console each other in a scene filled with corpses, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, lies unclothed, forlorn and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, filled with allusions. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the festive bizarre elements of James Ensor, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, countless nods to mainstream media (It seems certain that a particular work is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the works.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to analysis. It seems like one is tested on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are two relatively clear themes: the people in power, and the crowds that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about that. In 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the body of a historical figure, a black teenager who was lynched by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. A protester demonstrated against the work daily, and others demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of African-American suffering was the major headline of the biennial. It was the peak of the recent culture wars, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a world more divided, simplified and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get upset at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But all her subsequent work now exists in its shadow. She inevitably came out of that experience a transformed creator. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical art at the top tier.