The Artist Dana Schutz Review: An Orgy of Thick Paint from the Painter Who Outraged New York

The American painter cakes her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. This inaugural London exhibition is a messy, exuberant tribute of her medium, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you manage to uncover them.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – earning her acclaim as one of the most important figurative artists of her generation – is all about surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. This is art for artists, real high-level art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy losing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s plenty to engage you for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Works in the First Gallery

The works in the initial room are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. One piece shows a collection of forms trudges mindlessly towards something off canvas, waving hands and creating a path of debris in their path. In another presents a person receiving a huge mask in some bizarre initiation ritual before a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy to read any of this as social commentary, as commentary on the state of the US, on societal splits and angry, and mob mentality is transforming all to waste.

The Kiss by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, instead of the masses that support them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a green-clad man recline in golden chairs – while in other works a pair comfort one another in a scene strewn with corpses, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, rests naked, forlorn and helpless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, covered in allusions. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, numerous references to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the artworks.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to interpretation. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Titian but, in my view, there are two relatively clear narratives: the ruling class, and the public that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

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 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. A protester demonstrated against the painting daily, and some demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of black pain was the biggest story of the biennial. This marked the height of the late 2010s culture wars, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a world more divided, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

It could have ruined her career, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But all her subsequent work now 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 still engages in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical art at the top tier.