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Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in heavy layers of viscous pigment. This inaugural 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

Her method – earning her acclaim as one of the most important figurative artists of her era – is all about texture, application, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks losing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s plenty to keep you going for a long time. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

The works in the first gallery are full of enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. 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 features a figure receiving a large disguise in some bizarre initiation ritual before a horde of unattractive followers. It’s easy to interpret these as social commentary, as commentary on the state of the US, on societal splits and angry, and mob mentality is turning everything to waste.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, instead of the crowds that follow them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a green-clad man sit back in golden chairs – while in other works a pair console each other in a scene filled with dead bodies, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, rests unclothed, desolate and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, covered in allusions. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, countless nods to mainstream media (It seems certain that a particular work is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). You could spend hours spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the artworks.

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 themes: the ruling class, and the crowds that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about that. Back in 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the body of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was lynched by racist perpetrators in a southern state in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. A protester picketed the work daily, and others called for it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent painting – perhaps compassionately – a image of black pain was the major headline of the biennial. This marked the height of the late 2010s social conflicts, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a society more divided, simplified and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her career, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But all her subsequent work since exists in its shadow. She unavoidably emerged of that experience a transformed creator. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical painting at the top tier.