🔗 Share this article Dana Schutz Exhibition Overview: A Feast of Gloop from the Painter Who Outraged New York Dana Schutz cakes her canvases in thick gobs of viscous pigment. This inaugural London exhibition 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 Her method – which has seen her lauded as a leading painters of her generation – is focused on texture, application, hue and substance. This is art for artists, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks losing yourself in layers of pigment 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 These pieces in the initial room are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. One piece depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly towards something outside the frame, waving hands and leaving a trail of debris in their wake. A different work features a figure given a huge mask in some bizarre ceremony before a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to read any of this as political, as commentary on America’s condition, on societal splits and angry, and mob mentality is transforming all to rubbish. An Embrace by the artist. Changing Themes In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, rather than the crowds that follow them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a green-clad man recline in gilded seats – whereas in other works a pair comfort one another in a landscape filled with corpses, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, lies unclothed, desolate and helpless in a bed. Influences and Allusions This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, covered in references. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the history of painting, numerous references to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the works. The Example by the exhibitor. Meaning and Stories Painting this dense, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to interpretation. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct themes: the people in power, and the public that they provoke. The 2017 Scandal And the artist understands about that. In 2017, her painting Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of Emmett Till, a young African-American who was lynched by two white men in a southern state in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. An activist demonstrated against the work daily, and some called for it to be removed. An artist of European descent painting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of African-American suffering was the major headline of the event. This marked the height of the late 2010s culture wars, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a society increasingly polarized, less nuanced and angrier 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 move on. But all her subsequent work now exists in its influence. She inevitably came out of that experience a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical painting at the top tier.