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Dana Schutz smothers her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. Her inaugural London exhibition is a messy, exuberant tribute of her material, but significant themes 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 figurative artists of her generation – is focused on surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks losing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s enough here to engage you for a while. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, symbolic visuals that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the initial room are full of enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. One piece depicts a group of figures trudges mindlessly towards something outside the frame, waving hands and creating a path of trash in their path. In another features a figure given a huge mask in an odd initiation ritual before a horde of ugly supporters. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as commentary on the state of the US, on how society is divided and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

An Embrace by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, rather than the masses that support them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a man in green recline in golden chairs – while in other works a pair console each other in a landscape strewn with dead bodies, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, rests unclothed, desolate and powerless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, covered in allusions. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the history of painting, numerous references to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the artworks.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to analysis. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Titian but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct themes: the ruling class, and the public that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about such dynamics. In 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of Emmett Till, a young African-American who was murdered by two white men in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. A protester demonstrated against the work each day, and some called for it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent depicting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of African-American suffering was the major headline of the event. This marked the height of the recent culture wars, 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 seems almost charming that people had the time to get upset at this emotional, mournful painting.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her career, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But everything she’s done since exists in its influence. She inevitably came out of that experience a changed artist. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical art at the highest level.