The Artist Dana Schutz Exhibition Overview: An Orgy of Thick Paint from the Artist Who Outraged New York

Dana Schutz cakes her canvases in heavy layers of gooey paint. Her inaugural London exhibition is a messy, exuberant tribute of her medium, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as one of the most important figurative artists of her era – is focused on surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, real high-level aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s plenty to keep you going for a while. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that really makes the artworks resonate.

Works in the First Gallery

The works in the first gallery are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. One piece shows a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event outside the frame, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of debris in their path. In another presents a person given a huge mask in some bizarre initiation ritual in front of a horde of ugly supporters. It’s easy to interpret these as social commentary, as commentary on the state of the US, on societal splits and furious, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, 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 gilded seats – while in other works a couple console each other in a scene strewn with corpses, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, lies unclothed, desolate and powerless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, filled with references. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the history of painting, numerous references to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a portrait of a cartoon character from an animated series). It would take time spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the artworks.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic invites to analysis. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Titian but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the ruling class, and the public that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about that. In 2017, her painting a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was lynched by two white men in Mississippi in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. A protester demonstrated against the work daily, and others demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist painting – perhaps compassionately – a image of African-American suffering 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. Looking back now, in a society more divided, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get angry at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her career, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But everything she’s done since exists in its influence. She unavoidably came out of that ordeal a changed artist. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical painting at the highest level.