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The American painter cakes her paintings in thick gobs of gooey paint. Her inaugural London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as one of the most important painters of her era – is all about surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, real high-level aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks losing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s plenty to engage you for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the first gallery are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. In one depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their path. In another features a person given a huge mask in some bizarre ceremony before a horde of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to interpret these as political, as observation on the state of the US, on how society is divided and furious, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to shift her focus to the people in power, rather than 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 – while in other works a pair comfort one another in a landscape filled with corpses, and a woman, perhaps the artist, rests naked, desolate and helpless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, filled with references. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the art historical tradition, numerous references to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a depiction of a cartoon character from an animated series). It would take time identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the works.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical invites to analysis. It seems like one is tested on the symbolism of a Titian but, for my money, there are two relatively clear themes: the people in power, and the public that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about that. In 2017, her painting a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was lynched by racist perpetrators in a southern state in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her own gain. An activist demonstrated against the painting daily, and some called for it to be removed. An artist of European descent depicting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of black pain was the biggest story of the biennial. 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, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get upset at this emotional, mournful 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 unavoidably emerged of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political art at the highest level.