Dana Schutz Exhibition Overview: An Orgy of Gloop from the Artist Who Outraged NYC

The American painter cakes her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. This inaugural London show is a splodgy, orgiastic 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 one of the most important figurative artists of her era – is focused on surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. This is art for artists, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s plenty to engage you for a while. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, symbolic visuals that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the first gallery are full of enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. In one shows a group of figures stomps senselessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and leaving a trail of trash in their path. In another presents a figure receiving a large disguise in some bizarre initiation ritual in front of a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as commentary on the state of the US, on how society is divided and angry, and mob mentality is transforming all to waste.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, instead of the masses that follow them. Mysterious forms stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a green-clad man recline in gilded seats – while in other works a pair console each other in a landscape 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 stuff, covered in references. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the history of painting, numerous references to pop culture (It seems certain that a particular work is a depiction of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the works.

A Model by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic invites to analysis. I feel as if one is tested on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are two relatively clear themes: the ruling class, and the crowds that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about such dynamics. Back in 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the body of a historical figure, a black teenager who was murdered by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of exploiting black death for her own gain. An activist demonstrated against the work daily, and others called for it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent painting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of African-American suffering was the major headline of the biennial. 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 identical team. Looking back now, in a society increasingly polarized, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get angry at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her career, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But all her subsequent work now exists in its influence. She inevitably emerged of that ordeal a changed artist. 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.