Dana Schutz Exhibition Overview: An Orgy of Thick Paint from the Painter Who Shocked NYC

The American painter smothers her canvases in heavy layers of gooey paint. This inaugural London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute of her material, but some big messages are smuggled through 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 all about surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy losing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s plenty to engage you for a while. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, symbolic visuals that really makes the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the initial room are full of enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. One piece depicts a group of figures stomps senselessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and creating a path of debris in their wake. A different work presents a figure receiving a large disguise in some bizarre ceremony in front of a horde of ugly supporters. It’s easy to read any of this as social commentary, as observation on the state of the US, on how society is divided and angry, and mob mentality is turning everything to rubbish.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to shift her focus to the people in power, instead of the masses that support them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a green-clad man sit back in gilded seats – whereas in other works a couple console each other in a scene strewn with dead bodies, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, lies unclothed, desolate and helpless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, covered in allusions. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of James Ensor, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the history of painting, countless nods to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a depiction of a cartoon character from an animated series). It would take time spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the works.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical invites to interpretation. It seems like one is tested on the meaning of a Titian but, in my view, there are two relatively clear themes: the people in power, and the crowds that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about that. In 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the body of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was lynched by two white men in a southern state in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. A protester demonstrated against the work daily, and some called for it to be destroyed. A white artist painting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the biennial. This marked the height of the recent social conflicts, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the same side. Looking back now, in a society increasingly polarized, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get angry at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her career, and the artist likely aims to move on. But all her subsequent work since exists in its influence. She unavoidably came out of that experience a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical painting at the top tier.