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Dana Schutz smothers her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. Her first proper London show is a messy, exuberant celebration of her material, but significant themes are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as a leading figurative artists 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 immersing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s enough here to engage you for a while. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that really makes the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the first gallery are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. One piece depicts a group of figures stomps senselessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of debris in their path. A different work features a figure given a huge mask in an odd ceremony before a horde of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to read any of this as social commentary, as observation on the state of the US, on societal splits and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

The Kiss by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the people in power, rather than the crowds that support them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a man in green sit back in gilded seats – while in additional pieces a pair comfort one another in a landscape strewn with corpses, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, rests unclothed, forlorn and powerless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, filled with references. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the festive bizarre elements of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the history of painting, countless nods to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). You could spend hours spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the artworks.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic invites to interpretation. I feel as if one is tested on the meaning of a Titian but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct themes: the people in power, and the crowds that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about that. In 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of a historical figure, a black teenager who was lynched by two white men in Mississippi in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. A protester picketed the painting daily, and some demanded it to be removed. An artist of European descent depicting – perhaps compassionately – a image of black pain was the major headline of the event. It was the peak of the late 2010s culture wars, 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 seems almost charming that people had the time to get angry at this heartfelt, sorrowful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

It could have ruined her career, and the artist likely aims to move on. But everything she’s done now exists in its shadow. She inevitably emerged of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical art at the highest level.