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Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in heavy layers of viscous pigment. This first proper London show is a messy, exuberant celebration 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 painters of her era – is all about surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks losing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s enough here to engage you for a while. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the first gallery are full of giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. In one shows a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and leaving a trail of debris in their wake. A different work presents a person given a large disguise in some bizarre initiation ritual before a horde of ugly supporters. It’s easy to interpret these as social commentary, as commentary on the state of the US, on societal splits and furious, and crowd psychology is transforming all to rubbish.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, instead of the crowds that follow them. Mysterious forms stuff their mouths with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a green-clad man recline in golden chairs – while in additional pieces a couple comfort one another in a scene filled with dead bodies, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, rests naked, desolate and helpless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, filled with references. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the festive bizarre elements 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 (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a depiction of a cartoon character from an animated series). You could spend hours spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the artworks.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, complex and allegorical invites to interpretation. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Titian but, for my money, there are two relatively clear narratives: the ruling class, and the crowds that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about such dynamics. Back in 2017, her painting Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of Emmett Till, a young African-American who was lynched by two white men in a southern state in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. An activist picketed the work each day, and some called for it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of black pain was the biggest story of the biennial. It was the peak of the recent culture wars, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a world more divided, simplified and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get upset at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her professional life, and the artist likely aims to move on. But all her subsequent work now exists in its influence. She unavoidably came out of that ordeal a changed artist. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical painting at the top tier.