The Artist Dana Schutz Exhibition Overview: A Feast of Thick Paint from the Painter Who Outraged New York

The American painter cakes her canvases in thick gobs of gooey paint. Her inaugural London show is a messy, exuberant celebration of her medium, but significant themes are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Her method – earning her acclaim as a leading figurative artists of her era – is all about texture, application, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks losing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s enough here to keep you going for a long time. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, symbolic visuals that really makes the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the first gallery are full of giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. One piece shows a group of figures stomps senselessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and creating a path of trash in their wake. A different work presents a person given a large disguise in an odd initiation ritual in front of a horde of unattractive followers. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and angry, and mob mentality is turning everything to waste.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to shift her focus to the people in power, instead of the masses that follow them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a man in green sit back in golden chairs – whereas in additional pieces a couple comfort one another in a landscape strewn with dead bodies, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, lies unclothed, desolate and powerless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, filled with allusions. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, countless nods to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a depiction of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

A Model by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to analysis. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Titian but, in my view, there are two relatively clear themes: the ruling class, and the crowds that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about such dynamics. In 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the body of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was lynched by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of exploiting black death for her own gain. An activist picketed the painting each day, and some demanded it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent painting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of black pain was the major headline of the biennial. It was the peak of the late 2010s social conflicts, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a society more divided, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments 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 progress. But everything she’s done now exists in its shadow. She inevitably came out of that experience a transformed creator. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical painting at the highest level.