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Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. This first proper London exhibition is a messy, exuberant celebration of her material, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as a leading figurative artists of her generation – is focused on surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy losing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s enough here to engage you for a long time. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, 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 towards something outside the frame, brandishing fists and creating a path of trash in their wake. A different work features a figure given a huge mask in an odd ceremony in front of a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s easy to interpret these as social commentary, as commentary on the state of the US, 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, the artist appears to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, rather than the masses that support 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 comfort one another in a landscape filled with corpses, and a woman, perhaps the artist, rests unclothed, desolate and powerless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, filled with references. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, 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 art historical tradition, countless nods to pop culture (It seems certain that one painting is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours identifying 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 leaves itself open to analysis. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Titian but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct themes: the ruling class, and the public that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about that. In 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered by racist perpetrators in a southern state in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of exploiting black death for her own gain. A protester demonstrated against the painting each day, and some called for it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of black pain was the major headline 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, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get angry at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her professional life, and the artist likely aims 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 still engages in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical art at the highest level.