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Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in heavy layers of viscous pigment. Her inaugural London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute of her material, but significant themes are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – which has seen her lauded as a leading painters of her generation – is focused on surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. 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 keep you going for a while. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that truly drives the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the first gallery are full of enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. One piece shows a group of figures stomps senselessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their wake. In another features a person given a large disguise in some bizarre ceremony before a horde of unattractive followers. It’s easy to interpret these as social commentary, as observation on the state of the US, on how society is divided and furious, and mob mentality is transforming all to waste.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the people in power, instead of the crowds that follow them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a man in green recline in gilded seats – whereas in additional pieces a pair console each other in a landscape filled with corpses, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, rests naked, desolate and powerless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, filled with references. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the history of painting, countless nods to pop culture (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 bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to analysis. It seems like one is tested on the symbolism of a Titian but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the people in power, and the public that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about that. In 2017, her painting a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of a historical figure, a young African-American who was murdered by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. A protester demonstrated against the painting daily, and some called for it to be removed. An artist of European descent painting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of African-American suffering 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 identical team. In retrospect, in a society more divided, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

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 emerged of that ordeal a changed artist. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political painting at the top tier.