🔗 Share this article

Dana Schutz smothers her paintings in heavy layers of viscous pigment. Her first proper London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute of her material, but some big messages are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Her method – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important figurative artists of her generation – is all about surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, real high-level aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy losing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s plenty to engage you for a while. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the initial room are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. In one depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly towards something outside the frame, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their wake. In another features a person given a large disguise in an odd ceremony in front of a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s easy to read any of this as social commentary, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to waste.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to shift her focus to the people in power, rather than the crowds that support them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a man in green recline in gilded seats – while in additional pieces a couple comfort one another in a scene filled with corpses, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, lies unclothed, desolate and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, covered in allusions. You’ll find 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 Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, numerous references to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). You could spend hours spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the artworks.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical invites 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 narratives: the ruling class, and the crowds that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about such dynamics. In 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the body of Emmett Till, a young African-American who was murdered by racist perpetrators in a southern state in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. A protester picketed the painting each day, and others demanded it to be removed. An artist of European descent painting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of African-American suffering was the major headline of the event. It was the peak of the recent social conflicts, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a society more divided, simplified and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get angry at this emotional, mournful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her career, and the artist likely aims to progress. But everything she’s done now exists in its shadow. She unavoidably came out of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical painting at the top tier.