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Dana Schutz smothers her canvases in heavy layers of gooey paint. This first proper London exhibition is a messy, exuberant celebration of her medium, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important painters of her generation – is focused on texture, application, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, real high-level aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy losing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s plenty to engage you for a long time. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the initial room are full of giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. In one depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event off canvas, waving hands and creating a path of debris in their path. In another features a person given a huge mask in an odd initiation ritual in front of 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 furious, and mob mentality is turning everything to waste.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the people in power, instead of the crowds that follow them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; 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 corpses, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, rests naked, desolate and powerless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, covered in allusions. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the festive bizarre elements of James Ensor, the large-headed oddities of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the history of painting, numerous references to mainstream media (It seems certain that a particular work is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to analysis. It seems like one is tested on the meaning 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 Schutz should know about that. Back in 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of a historical figure, a black teenager who was murdered by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. A protester demonstrated against the work each day, and others demanded it to be removed. A white artist painting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of black pain was the biggest story of the event. This marked the height of the recent social conflicts, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a society more divided, simplified and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get upset at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her professional life, and the artist likely aims to move on. But all her subsequent work now exists in its shadow. She inevitably came out of that ordeal a changed artist. 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.