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Dana Schutz smothers her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. This inaugural London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute of her material, but some big messages are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as a leading figurative artists of her era – is all about texture, application, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, real high-level art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s plenty to engage you for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Works in the First Gallery

The works in the first gallery are full of enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. One piece shows a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and creating a path of debris in their path. In another features a person given a large disguise in an odd initiation ritual in front of a horde of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to read any of this as social commentary, as observation on America’s condition, on how society is divided and furious, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

The Kiss by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, instead of the crowds that follow them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a green-clad man sit back in golden chairs – whereas in other works a pair comfort one another in a scene strewn with corpses, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, lies unclothed, desolate and helpless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, covered in allusions. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, countless nods 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 works.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to interpretation. It seems like one is tested on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the ruling class, and the crowds that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about such dynamics. In 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the body of Emmett Till, a young African-American who was lynched by two white men in a southern state 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 personal benefit. An activist picketed the work daily, and others demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist painting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the event. This marked the height of the recent social conflicts, a time that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a world more divided, simplified and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get angry at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her professional life, and the artist likely aims to move on. But everything she’s done since exists in its influence. She inevitably came out of that experience a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political painting at the highest level.