🔗 Share this article

The American painter cakes her canvases in heavy layers of viscous pigment. This first proper London exhibition is a messy, exuberant celebration of her medium, but significant themes are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim 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 aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy losing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s enough here to engage you for a long time. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that really makes the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the initial room are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. In one depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event off canvas, waving hands and creating a path of trash in their path. A different work features a person receiving a large disguise in some bizarre ceremony before a horde of ugly supporters. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as commentary on America’s condition, on how society is divided and furious, and mob mentality is transforming all to rubbish.

The Kiss by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the people in power, rather than the masses that support them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a green-clad man recline in gilded seats – whereas in additional pieces a couple console each other in a scene strewn with corpses, and a woman, perhaps the artist, rests naked, forlorn and powerless in a bed.

Inspirations and References

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, filled with allusions. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness 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 depiction of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the works.

A Model by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic invites to interpretation. I feel as if one is tested on the meaning of a Titian but, in my view, there are two relatively clear themes: the people in power, and the public that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about that. In 2017, her painting Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the body of Emmett Till, a young African-American who was murdered by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – 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 painting daily, and some called for it to be destroyed. A white artist painting – perhaps compassionately – a image of black pain was the biggest story of the biennial. This marked the height of the late 2010s social conflicts, a time that featured infighting even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a society increasingly polarized, simplified and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But all her subsequent work now exists in its influence. She inevitably emerged of that experience a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical art at the highest level.