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

The American painter cakes her canvases in thick gobs of viscous pigment. This inaugural London show is a messy, exuberant tribute of her medium, but some big messages are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Her method – which has seen her lauded as a leading figurative artists of her era – is focused on texture, application, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s plenty to keep you going for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, symbolic visuals that really makes the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the first gallery are full of giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. One piece shows a collection of forms trudges mindlessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and leaving a trail of trash in their path. A different work features a person given a huge mask in an odd initiation ritual before a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy to interpret these as social commentary, as observation on the state of the US, on societal splits and angry, and crowd psychology is transforming all to rubbish.

The Kiss by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, rather than the masses that support them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a green-clad man recline in gilded seats – while in additional pieces a couple console each other in a landscape strewn with corpses, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, rests naked, desolate and helpless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, filled with allusions. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the art historical tradition, numerous references to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a portrait of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the works.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical invites to analysis. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Titian but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the ruling class, and the crowds that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about such dynamics. In 2017, her painting a titled piece – 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 – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. An activist demonstrated against the painting daily, and some called for it to be destroyed. A white artist painting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of black pain was the biggest story of the event. It was the peak of the recent culture wars, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. Looking back now, in a world more divided, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her career, 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 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.