🔗 Share this article The Artist Dana Schutz Exhibition Overview: An Orgy of Thick Paint from the Painter Who Shocked NYC The American painter cakes her canvases in thick gobs of viscous pigment. Her inaugural London exhibition is a messy, exuberant celebration of her medium, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them. Schutz's Approach Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as a leading figurative artists of her generation – is focused on texture, application, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, real high-level aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy losing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s enough here to keep you going for a while. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that really makes the paintings tick. Initial Exhibition Pieces The works in the first gallery are full of enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. One piece shows a group of figures trudges mindlessly towards something outside the frame, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of trash in their wake. In another features a figure receiving a huge mask in some bizarre initiation ritual in front of a horde of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to read any of this as political, as observation on America’s condition, on how society is divided and furious, and mob mentality is transforming all to rubbish. An Embrace by the artist. Changing Themes In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, instead of the masses that support them. Mysterious forms fill their faces 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 console each other in a landscape strewn with corpses, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, rests unclothed, desolate and powerless in bed. Influences and Allusions This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, filled with references. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the large-headed oddities of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the history of painting, numerous references to pop culture (It seems certain that a particular work is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). You could spend hours spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the artworks. A Model by the exhibitor. Interpretation and Narratives Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to interpretation. It seems like one is tested on the symbolism of a Titian but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct themes: the people in power, and the public that they bait. The 2017 Scandal And Schutz should know about such dynamics. Back in 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction 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 shown at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. An activist demonstrated against the painting each day, and some demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist painting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of black pain was the major headline of the biennial. It was the peak of the recent social conflicts, a time that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a society increasingly polarized, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get angry at this heartfelt, sorrowful painting. Aftermath and Recent Art It could have ruined her professional life, and the artist likely aims to move on. But everything she’s done now exists in its shadow. She inevitably came out of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political art at the highest level.