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Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in thick gobs of gooey paint. This first proper London show is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as a leading painters of her era – is all about texture, application, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s enough here to engage you for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that really makes the artworks resonate.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the first gallery are full of enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. One piece shows a collection of forms trudges mindlessly toward an event outside the frame, brandishing fists and creating a path of trash in their path. In another presents a person receiving a large disguise in some bizarre initiation ritual in front of a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to read any of this as political, as commentary on America’s condition, on societal splits and angry, and crowd psychology is transforming all to waste.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the people in power, instead of the masses that support them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a man in green recline in gilded seats – whereas in additional pieces a couple console each other in a landscape strewn with corpses, and a woman, perhaps the artist, lies naked, forlorn and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, filled with references. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the art historical tradition, numerous references to pop culture (It seems certain 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 works.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical invites to analysis. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Titian but, for my money, there are two relatively clear narratives: the people in power, and the crowds that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about that. In 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of Emmett Till, a young African-American who was murdered by two white men in a southern state in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. A protester picketed the painting daily, and others called for it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of black pain was the biggest story of the event. It was the peak of the late 2010s culture wars, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the same side. Looking back now, in a society increasingly polarized, simplified and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get upset at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But all her subsequent work now exists in its shadow. She inevitably came out of that experience a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political painting at the top tier.