The Artist Dana Schutz Exhibition Overview: A Feast of Thick Paint from the Painter Who Outraged NYC

The American painter smothers her paintings in thick gobs of viscous pigment. Her first proper London show is a messy, exuberant celebration of her material, but some big messages are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Her method – earning her acclaim as one of the most important figurative artists of her generation – is all about texture, application, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, real high-level aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks losing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s plenty to engage you for a long time. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, symbolic visuals that really makes the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the first gallery are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. One piece depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event outside the frame, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of trash in their path. A different work features a person receiving a huge mask in some bizarre initiation ritual in front of a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to interpret these as political, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and furious, and mob mentality is turning everything to waste.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to redirect attention to the people in power, instead of the crowds that follow them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a man in green recline in gilded seats – while in additional pieces a pair comfort one another in a scene strewn with dead bodies, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, rests naked, desolate and powerless in a 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 an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the history of painting, countless nods to mainstream media (It seems certain that a particular work is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the artworks.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical invites to interpretation. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Titian but, in my view, there are two relatively clear themes: the ruling class, and the crowds that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about that. Back in 2017, her painting a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of Emmett Till, a young African-American who was lynched by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. An activist picketed the painting daily, and some demanded it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent painting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of black pain was the major headline of the event. This marked the height of the late 2010s social conflicts, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a world increasingly polarized, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But everything she’s done since exists in its shadow. She unavoidably came out of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical art at the highest level.