🔗 Share this article

Dana Schutz cakes her canvases in thick gobs of viscous pigment. Her inaugural London exhibition is a messy, exuberant tribute of her medium, but some big messages are subtly embedded 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 all about texture, application, hue and substance. This is art for artists, real high-level art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s plenty to engage you for a long time. 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 populated by giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. One piece depicts a group of figures trudges mindlessly toward an event off canvas, waving hands and leaving a trail of debris in their path. A different work presents a figure receiving a huge mask in some bizarre ceremony before a horde of ugly supporters. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and furious, and mob mentality is turning everything to rubbish.

An Embrace by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to redirect attention to the people in power, rather than the masses that support them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a green-clad man recline in golden chairs – while in other works a pair console each other in a landscape filled with corpses, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, rests naked, desolate and powerless in bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, covered in references. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism 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. There are riffs on the history of painting, numerous references to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a portrait of a cartoon character from an animated series). You could spend hours identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the works.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic invites to interpretation. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Titian 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 that. In 2017, her painting Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was lynched by two white men in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. An activist demonstrated against the work each day, and others called for it to be removed. A white artist painting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of black pain was the biggest story of the event. This marked the height of the recent culture wars, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a world increasingly polarized, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get angry at this emotional, mournful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her career, and the artist likely aims to move on. But all her subsequent work since exists in its influence. She unavoidably came out of that experience a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical art at the highest level.