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

Dana Schutz smothers her canvases in thick gobs of gooey paint. This first proper London exhibition is a messy, exuberant celebration of her medium, but significant themes are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as a leading figurative artists of her generation – is all about texture, application, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, there’s plenty to engage you for a while. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, symbolic visuals that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the first gallery are full of giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. In one depicts a group of figures stomps senselessly toward an event outside the frame, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their wake. A different work features a figure receiving a large disguise in an odd initiation ritual before a horde of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to interpret these as social commentary, as commentary on the state of the US, on how society is divided and angry, and mob mentality is turning everything to waste.

An Embrace by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the people in power, rather than the masses that support them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a man in green sit back in golden chairs – whereas in other works a couple console each other in a scene filled with corpses, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, rests unclothed, forlorn and helpless in bed.

Inspirations and References

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, covered in references. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the large-headed oddities of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the history of painting, countless nods to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). It would take time identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the artworks.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to interpretation. I feel as if one is tested on the meaning of a Titian but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct themes: the people in power, and the crowds that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about such dynamics. Back in 2017, her painting a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of a historical figure, a young African-American who was lynched by two white men in Mississippi in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her own gain. A protester picketed the work daily, and others demanded it to be removed. A white artist painting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of black pain was the major headline 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 society increasingly polarized, less nuanced and more hostile 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 career, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But all her subsequent work now exists in its influence. She inevitably came out of that ordeal a changed artist. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical art at the highest level.