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Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in heavy layers of viscous pigment. This first proper London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her material, but significant themes are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – which has seen her lauded as a leading painters of her generation – is all about texture, application, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s plenty to engage you for a while. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that really makes the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the initial room are full of enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. In one depicts a collection of forms trudges mindlessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of trash in their wake. In another features a person given a huge mask in some bizarre initiation ritual in front of a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy to read any of this as social commentary, as commentary on the state of the US, on societal splits and angry, and crowd psychology is transforming all to rubbish.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, rather than the masses that support them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a green-clad man recline in gilded seats – whereas in additional pieces a couple console each other in a landscape filled with corpses, and a woman, perhaps the artist, lies unclothed, desolate and helpless in bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, covered in allusions. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, countless nods to pop culture (It seems certain that one painting is a portrait of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the works.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic invites to analysis. I feel as if one is tested on the symbolism of a Titian but, for my money, there are two relatively clear themes: the ruling class, and the crowds that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about such dynamics. In 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. A protester demonstrated against the painting daily, and others demanded it to be removed. A white artist painting – perhaps compassionately – a image of black pain was the biggest story of the biennial. This marked the height of the late 2010s culture wars, a time that featured infighting even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a world more divided, simplified and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get upset at this emotional, mournful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her professional life, and the artist likely aims to progress. But everything she’s done now exists in its influence. She inevitably emerged of that experience a transformed creator. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political art at the highest level.