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Dana Schutz smothers her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. This inaugural London show is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute of her medium, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as a leading painters of her generation – is focused on surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, real high-level art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks losing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s plenty to engage you for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that really makes the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the first gallery are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. In one depicts a collection of forms trudges mindlessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and creating a path of trash in their path. In another presents a person given a huge mask in some bizarre ceremony in front of a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to interpret these as social commentary, as observation on the state of the US, on societal splits and furious, and crowd psychology is transforming all to rubbish.

An Embrace by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to shift her focus to the people in power, rather than the crowds that follow them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a man in green recline in golden chairs – while in other works a couple console each other in a scene strewn with corpses, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, lies naked, forlorn 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 an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the history of painting, numerous references to mainstream media (It seems certain that a particular work is a depiction of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the works.

A Model by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to interpretation. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Titian but, in my view, there are two relatively clear narratives: the ruling class, and the crowds that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about that. Back in 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of a historical figure, a young African-American who was murdered by two white men in a southern state in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. An activist demonstrated against the painting each day, and others called for it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the biennial. It was the peak of the late 2010s social conflicts, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a society increasingly polarized, simplified and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get upset at this emotional, mournful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her professional life, and the artist likely aims to progress. But everything she’s done since exists in its influence. She inevitably emerged of that experience a changed artist. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she continues to practice in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political painting at the highest level.