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The American painter smothers her canvases in thick gobs of gooey paint. This first proper London exhibition is a messy, exuberant celebration of her medium, but some big messages are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Her method – earning her acclaim as a leading painters of her generation – is all about surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. This is art for artists, real high-level aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s plenty to engage you for a while. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that really makes the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

The works in the initial room are full of enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. In one shows a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event outside the frame, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of trash in their wake. A different work features a figure receiving a huge mask in an odd ceremony before a horde of ugly supporters. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as observation on America’s condition, on how society is divided and furious, and crowd psychology is turning everything to waste.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, instead of the masses that follow them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a man in green recline in gilded seats – whereas in other works a pair comfort one another in a scene filled with corpses, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, rests unclothed, forlorn and powerless in bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, covered in references. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the festive bizarre elements 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 (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). It would take time spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

A Model by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to analysis. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the ruling class, and the crowds that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about that. Back in 2017, her painting Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of a historical figure, a black teenager who was murdered by two white men in Mississippi in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her own gain. An activist picketed the work each day, and others called for it to be removed. A white artist painting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the biennial. This marked the height of the recent culture wars, a period that featured infighting 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 heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her career, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But all her subsequent work since exists in its shadow. She inevitably emerged of that experience a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical painting at the highest level.