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The American painter smothers her canvases in thick gobs of viscous pigment. This first proper London show is a messy, exuberant celebration of her material, 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 figurative artists of her generation – is all about texture, application, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy losing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s enough here to keep you going for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the initial room are full of enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. One piece shows a group of figures trudges mindlessly towards something outside the frame, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their wake. A different work presents a figure given a huge mask in some bizarre initiation ritual in front of a horde of unattractive followers. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as commentary on America’s condition, on societal splits and furious, and crowd psychology 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 leaders and elites, instead of the masses that follow them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a man in green recline in gilded seats – whereas in other works a pair comfort one another in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, lies naked, desolate and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, filled with allusions. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the history of painting, numerous references to mainstream media (It seems certain that one painting is a portrait of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the works.

A Model by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to analysis. I feel as if one is tested on the symbolism of a Titian but, for my money, there are two relatively clear themes: the ruling class, and the public that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about that. In 2017, her painting Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered by racist perpetrators in a southern state in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. An activist demonstrated against the painting each day, and others called for it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent painting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of black pain was the major headline 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 more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get angry at this emotional, mournful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

It could have ruined her career, and the artist likely aims to progress. But all her subsequent work since exists in its influence. She inevitably emerged of that experience a transformed creator. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political painting at the top tier.