The Artist Dana Schutz Exhibition Overview: An Orgy of Gloop from the Painter Who Shocked New York

Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. This inaugural London show is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but significant themes are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important painters of her era – is focused on surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. This is art for artists, real high-level aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks losing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s plenty to engage you for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the initial room are full of enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. In one depicts a collection of forms trudges mindlessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their path. A different work features a person receiving a huge mask in an odd initiation ritual in front of a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s easy to read any of this as social commentary, as commentary on America’s condition, on societal splits and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to waste.

The Kiss by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to redirect attention to the people in power, rather than the masses that follow them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a man in green recline in golden chairs – whereas in other works a couple console each other in a scene strewn with dead bodies, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, rests unclothed, desolate and helpless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, covered in allusions. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, countless nods to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, complex and allegorical invites to analysis. It seems like one is tested on the symbolism of a Titian but, for my money, there are two relatively clear narratives: the ruling class, and the crowds that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about such dynamics. Back in 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of a historical figure, a young African-American who was murdered by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. A protester demonstrated against the work daily, and some demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – perhaps compassionately – a image of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the event. It was the peak of the late 2010s social conflicts, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a society more divided, simplified and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get upset at this emotional, mournful painting.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her professional life, and the artist likely aims to progress. But all her subsequent work now exists in its influence. She inevitably emerged of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical painting at the top tier.